Qubix | Case Study - Hyde Housing

Hyde Housing, one of London's largest social housing provider, unifies and de-risks their planning processes by moving to the cloud in 3 weeks.

Hyde, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017, provides homes at prices people can afford to buy or rent on long tenancies in London, the south east and the east of England. Hyde puts a roof over the heads of people who otherwise would not have one, providing them with easy-to-use modern landlord services. Hyde Housing is one of the largest UK providers of social housing in London.

Hyde's on-premises Hyperion Planning, implemented in 2010, was fast approaching end of support and performance was degrading due to its ageing infrastructure. Not only was this harming user confidence, it also presented Hyde with considerable technical risk. On top of this, the planning application had not been optimized for Hyde’s evolving business requirements. This resulted in users departing from the planning system to perform key planning tasks in siloed spreadsheets. It also meant data had to be manually added to the system rather than flowing through the system processes.

It was clear to Hyde its current technology platform was increasing business risk, process inefficiency as well as costs. Internal changes, including an IT rationalization and cost reduction initiative, also furthered the need to simplify their finance systems landscape. Hyde needed a connected, reliable and scalable platform to enable its users to focus on generating insight and driving business efficiency.

"By moving from on-premises Hyperion Planning to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, we streamlined our application, reduced the amount of manual tasks and improved performance of the application. Our users can now focus on analyzing business results and make faster decisions."

Alison Seedat
Finance Systems Manager

Qubix was brought in to help de-risk and streamline Hyde's technology platform. Our team migrated Hyde's core on-premises planning and budgeting processes to Oracle EPM Planning Cloud. Qubix Cloudbridge was also implemented to improve data management and integration between the planning application, ERP system and other source systems to ensure Hyde was able to fully leverage the value of its data moving forward. This engagement utilized Qubix Boarding Pass to Cloud - our best practice methodology to planning, budgeting and forecasting that draws on industry experience, prior project success and intelligent solution design principles. This enabled Qubix to provide Hyde with a rapid, cost-effective and highly capable solution in rapid 3 week timeframe.

"Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is far more robust, stable and easier to manage than our old on premise solution. Having the monthly updates is great. Knowing we can rely on it is brilliant."

Alison Seedat
Finance Systems Manager

Challenges

Degrading system performance which presented Hyde with increased technical risks and functionality issues.
Risked being on an unsupported version of on-premises Hyperion Planning.
Changing business needs resulted in users departing from the planning system, with some activities performed on siloed spreadsheets, instead of a single unified process.
Excessive time taken to load data and adjustments delaying users from meeting deadlines.
Users unable to report and analyze at the required granularity.
Was under pressure to reduce IT support costs due to a company-wide IT rationalization program.
Technology platform was difficult reengineer to allow for integrations with Hyde's other technology assets.

Solution

Implementation of Oracle EPM Planning Cloud Service (PBCS)
Data management and integration between source systems, planning applications and ERP system using Qubix Cloudbridge
Qubix Journey to Cloud Methodology to accelerate delivery to the cloud
Provided user manuals and training for planning system users

Results

Redesigned the application removing unwanted hierarchies and data making it more suitable for Hyde's evolving business requirements
Improved environment stability and performance, increasing user confidence and reducing the time required for budgeting and reporting
Delivered a streamlined application, reducing the number of reports from 40 to 10
Loading of adjustments reduced from hours to minutes resulting in less time doing admin tasks and more time analyzing data
A reduction from 8 servers to a cloud-based system reducing total cost of ownership and removing reliance on IT
Using Qubix Cloudbridge, the data upload frequency was automated and reduced to 30-minute intervals from 2 hours (and the duration was reduced from over an hour to less than 5 minutes) which resulted in reporting deadlines being met