If you are looking for a great example of complex modeling in IBM Cognos TM1, look no further than the case study on New York Blood Center. Imagine having untold numbers of separate models in disparate systems – such as Excel and Access – all built for a single purpose, but that did not talk to each other? How could you answer simple questions about the data, let alone complex questions?
That’s the situation that New York Blood Center (NYBC) faced. NYBC is one of the largest independent, community-based blood centers in the country. In 2012 NYBC brought in a new CFO, Beth Gibson, who, in turn, brought in a new director of financial transformation a year later. Diane Arritt, who took on the role of Director of Finance Transformation, was charged with taking the old, manual, largely spreadsheet-based financial infrastructure and move to a single, sophisticated system.
Today, NYBC has a core set of TM1 models to store GL, billing, payroll, AR and AP data. From there, each model was then built out to support NYBC’s reporting and planning needs. Then we created a series of allocation models to allow for the proper distribution of overhead costs across all of NYBC’s reporting lines of businesses. We also created allocation models to allow NYBC to report on costs per unit related to collecting and distributing the blood products.
The TM1 system enables the organization to plan, model, allocate, report and manage the revenue and expense data faster, in more detail and more accurately than ever before. The overall impact of the new financial system is much larger than just the time savings, which is significant. With TM1, changes that previously took more than a day can be done in just minutes.
“Previously, it would have taken us at least three months to map general ledger accounts and accounting units into our processes to do the appropriate reporting for an acquisition,” said Diane Arritt, Director of Finance Transformation. “Now our team was able to produce combined financial results for management the first month we acquired the Community Blood Center of Greater Kansas City. We simply could not have done that without the hierarchies and flexibility of TM1.”