Member Article

Dean Close Foundation drives financial performance with help of MHR Analytics

Dean Close Foundation, a leading organisation in the educational sector is today announcing a partnership with MHR Analytics to improve its financial management, reporting and budgeting.

The Dean Close Foundation has grown rapidly in recent years, bringing new educational institutions into the group which includes leading nurseries and preparatory schools. As a result of this, the foundation has partnered with MHR Analytics, a specialist provider of business intelligence and analytics solutions, to improve the forecasting of its costs and revenues with IBM Planning Analytics.

Dean Close School was established in 1886 and was renamed The Dean Close Foundation in 2015, following acquisitions of St. John’s on-the-Hill Preparatory School in Chepstow and three large stand-alone nurseries. In 2017 the Foundation purchased a further two nurseries, bringing its total to five. With the added educational facilities, the Foundation needed to improve the ease, frequency and depth of its management information which was derived from manually reporting and planning through a spreadsheet-based system.

Dean Close’s existing finance system comprised of WCBS, Cascade and specialist nursery systems which had to be manually pulled into Excel to analyse the data. Based on a review of this system and on the Foundation’s needs and goals, MHR Analytics recommended implementing IBM Planning Analytics to fully automate and consolidate the data from the multiple platforms for different types of monthly reporting. This will cut the time wasted on administration, gathering together numbers and producing the monthly reports manually, and provide greater opportunity for faster growth.

Adrian Bowcher, Bursar at The Dean Close Foundation comments: “Changing our system to IBM Planning Analytics will enable us to manage our ever-growing organisation, keeping on top of our current financial performance and enhance planning for future performance. It will enable us to quickly analyse and present the growing volume of key data to the relevant managers and the Board. It will save a huge amount of staff hours, which would usually be spent manually analysing the data given and will help prevent mistakes being made.”

Nick Felton, SVP at MHR Analytics comments: “The Dean Close Foundation provides high quality education services in an extremely competitive market and as a result, the group needed a fresh approach to its financial planning operations. By overhauling its manual, spreadsheet-based systems, the organisation can now accurately analyse critical information, dramatically reducing administration and reporting times, and helping decision-makers focus on growth.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nick Till .