Success Story
How the University of South Carolina redefined its financial planning and analysis with Tru Consulting designed for Anaplan
Higher Education
What happens when a university outgrows spreadsheet-based budgeting and needs faster, more reliable financial decision-making? This case study explores how the University of South Carolina partnered with Tru and Anaplan to modernize financial planning, improve scenario modeling, and give finance teams greater confidence, visibility, and ownership over their data.
Industry
Higher Education
Platform
Anaplan
Use Case
Financial Planning
Connect With an Expert
Situation
More than science is at work inside South Carolina’s most comprehensive health sciences research and teaching institution. Every day, the University of South Carolina’s researchers and its fifty thousand undergraduate, professional, and graduate students search for solutions to complex issues that limit the health, prosperity, and futures of this generation.
The university reached a critical juncture with its old financial planning and budgeting system. Though it implemented new systems for finance and human capital management, most of the work and data were still tracked and evaluated manually on spreadsheets.
The university’s budget office had long outgrown its financial planning and budgeting system and its associated manual processes.
"Here in the budget office, we were doing everything on spreadsheets, and there was a lot in those spreadsheets, we frequently had to switch back and forth between them, which meant we were susceptible to all forms of error. Also, our processes were extremely inefficient. Whenever we were asked to run scenarios, it would take several days. What we really needed was a better and more efficient way of doing things, not only for our office but also for our colleagues in the colleges and the support units.”
Kelly and her team began looking for a real solution to the university’s financial planning issues. Their search prompted them to speak to different vendors at various conferences. Anaplan was the solution that was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. However, the university needed a partner to help implement Anaplan, and Tru turned out to be the perfect choice.
Solution
Leveraging its collective experience of more than three hundred years, Tru’s team is uniquely positioned to comprehend the challenges impacting contemporary colleges and universities. The company is committed to empowering and equipping finance and budget teams to liberate themselves from the constraints of IT dependency and spreadsheets.
Tru has partnered with Anaplan, a collaborative cloud-based platform with realtime capabilities in addressing the planning, budgeting, and forecasting needs of higher education institutions. Anaplan’s flexibility caters to organizations of all sizes, facilitating efficient and connected planning across all organizational levels.
Tru’s understanding of higher education and its effective presentation of what Anaplan could offer made the choice clear for the university. Kelly and her team were confident that Tru could deliver the real-time financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting solutions they needed.
“We believe that it is absolutely essential to be able to trust your partner, and we needed a partner with expertise. That’s why we selected Tru Consulting.”
Working collaboratively with Tru, the University of South Carolina began bringing its financial information into the modern age, moving from complicated spreadsheets to Anaplan. Tru provided training and guidance to the university’s team throughout the transition, fostering a learning environment that led to a deep understanding of the new system. The transparency and adaptability of Anaplan transformed the platform from a mysterious “black box” into a tool that the university’s staff could truly own and control.
Additionally, the engagement with Tru provided an opportunity for the university to identify and plan for future phases of development and implementation. This created a roadmap for continual improvement and expansion of the university’s financial management capabilities.
Results
Faster Financial Scenario Modeling:
The university can now model financial scenarios much more quickly. The new system saves time for both the finance department and the broader university, allowing Kelly’s team to respond to requests for scenario analysis almost instantly.
Greater Confidence in the Data:
Anaplan’s system integrity has given the university’s finance team increased confidence. With the older Excel spreadsheets, they had to continually check and recheck inputs. With Anaplan, they only need to confirm the accuracy of inputs once, knowing that the data will correctly flow through the entire system.
More Time Spent on Analysis:
“With Anaplan and working with Tru, I can see where my colleagues can spend time doing analysis rather than building, and that’s really the key for them,” said Kelly. “They feel a more enriching experience because they actually understand the inner workings of this, and they have ownership of it. We’ve also seen an impressive increase in morale from the users.”