03506 - Financial Planning and Analysis Solution

The Queensland Bulk Water Supply Authority, trading as Seqwater (the Customer), is the Queensland Government statutory authority responsible for ensuring a safe, secure and cost-effective bulk drinking water supply for 3.1 million people across South East Queensland. Seqwater also provides irrigation water to 1,200 rural customers in seven water supply schemes, as well as essential flood mitigation services. Seqwater is one of Australia’s largest water businesses with the most geographically-spread and diverse asset base of any capital city water authority, with operations extending from the New South Wales border to the base of the Toowoomba ranges and north to Gympie.

Seqwater:

• delivers a safe, secure and reliable bulk water supply to South East Queensland;
• provides essential flood mitigation services in managed catchment areas;
• manages catchment health, including monitoring water quality in these catchments;
• provides recreational facilities from its unrestricted infrastructure assets; and
• manages the long-term planning of the region’s future water needs.

The Budget Model and Quarterly Forecast processes are coordinated by the Management Accounting Team using the existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool which is Technology One (known internally as CIS – Corporate Information System). As implemented, CIS contains limited budget modelling and forecasting ability that updates the general ledger. Much of this functionality is manual and no reconciliation process is available. There is also no ability to conduct “What if” scenario analysis.

Feedback from previous budgeting cycles has identified opportunities for improvement in the following areas:

• Responsiveness – processing large volumes of data for data modelling causes poor performance in all modules of CIS that affects other areas of the business;
• Usability – Poor navigation and the inability to customise views is inefficient. This causes frustration and wasted time. Much of the work is exported to Excel to provide improved functionality;
• Accuracy - Issues with worksheets and model within the current tool causes inaccurate data; and
• Reporting – Each accountant uses a different format for reporting and sometimes completely different tools. An opportunity exists to create standardised reports and templates stored in a central location.

To realise these improvements, there is a need to undertake this financial planning and analysis effort outside of CIS, using a dedicated solution and revised processes.

Seqwater will consider offers for SaaS and On-Premise solutions. Tenders are free to offer one or both methods.

Seqwater will consider Waterfall and Agile delivery methods. Tenderers are free to offer one or both methods.

Seqwater is seeking a holistic solution via the tender process (i.e. acquisition of a solution, implementation and support and maintenance services). Organisations are discouraged from submitting standalone tenders for just part of Seqwater’s requirements. Seqwater will consider part of the services being undertaken by sub-contractors via the main contract.

Tenders should carefully consider the evaluation criteria listed at section 3.7.1 of this document, particularly the “mandatory” evaluation criteria, before investing the time and expense of submitting a tender. Any tender not meeting all mandatory evaluation criteria (or requirements) will be rejected.

The implementation is required to align with Seqwater’s below financial planning timeframes:

• 2019/2020 financial year forecasting commences July 2019; and
• 2020/2021 budget modelling commences September 2019.