Customer Success Story
KERA reduces time spent on budget management by 20% and improves accuracy
North Texas Public Broadcasting (KERA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community service organization based in Dallas, Texas, with a mission to service North Texas residents through public television, radio, and multimedia resources that educate, engage, inspire, inform, and entertain. More than 2.6 million listeners and viewers connect with KERA each day through their television, radio broadcasts, websites, social media, and mobile apps.
Challenge
KERA reduces time spent on budget management by 20% and improves accuracy
As part of a company-wide digital transformation, KERA needed a modern planning solution to replace its legacy and Excel-supported planning and budgeting processes. Its previous manual process was based on numerous Excel spreadsheets that slowed the team down and became difficult to manage. This slow process made it difficult for the team to deliver timely access to updated department budgets and actual information, which is critical for regulatory finance reporting. Moving forward, the team wanted a modern, integrated solution for the department heads to plan and manage their budgets and simplify their process. They also wanted the power to build their own dashboards and reports. After reviewing five other software vendors to select a cloud-based solution that offered seamless integration to their other existing systems, Jedox was chosen for being user-friendly and cost-effective, with implementation support.
Solution
A two-part implementation plan
The implementation plan began with improving their annual budgeting process: the organization moved away from numerous department-created spreadsheets to a direct input model for budget owners. This improved company-wide efficiency for department heads and the finance organization because the entire process connects to the historical financial data, and Jedox facilitated approval workflow and data analysis.
In the second implementation phase, KERA built a standardized monthly reporting and KPI dashboard package to be used by department managers, executives, and the finance staff for board and other external reporting. Payroll and HR teams have their own dashboards that integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to provide drill-down capabilities and “what if” scenarios.
Outcome
20% less time spent on budget management functions
Jedox allows KERA to present its financial information with more speed and improved accuracy. A single source of truth facilitates improved accuracy in financial reporting, which enables a total of 47 users, including finance staff and department heads, to devote their time to more strategic, value-adding activities. Today, department heads at KERA spend 20% less time on budget management functions and have significantly increased the time they can now devote to more strategic tasks. Jedox is central to all monthly reporting to all department heads, monthly board reporting, and next FY budgeting. Moving forward, KERA plans to set up more analytical dashboards and reports using integrated data from multiple source systems, and eventually incorporate the Jedox AI engine for projects and analysis.
