Nationwide Building Society faced dual complexities with an end-of-life cost management solution and workforce planning challenges. Seeking a more integrated approach, they adopted Board as their planning platform, centralizing data and fostering a culture of data analysis. This transition has led to significant improvements in data governance, cost management, forecasting, and workforce planning. Notably, the automation capabilities of Board have reduced workforce time allocation from 15 days to just 2-3 days, empowering the team with greater efficiency and self-sufficiency.
"The Board team has been fantastic and great to work with. There’s an all-hands-on-deck feeling working together toward a common goal—which is important—and we’re really pleased with where we are today.”
Andy Lomas
Nationwide Building Society, a British mutual financial institution and the largest building society in the world with over 16 million members, faced planning challenges across their cost centers. Their legacy cost management solution was reaching its end of life, prompting the need for a more comprehensive, integrated approach to streamline processes and enhance decision-making. Operating with a siloed, spreadsheet-based system led to several issues, including:
- reduced control over costs
- unreliable data from disjointed teams
- restricted insight and decision-making
Nationwide also needed to optimize workforce allocation to manage costs effectively and increase profitability. An integrated view would allow for better management of its workforce and anticipation of business needs.
Board addresses key planning challenges in workforce and cost management
In collaboration with KPMG, Nationwide adopted Board as its planning platform. With Board, data from various sources, systems, and formats can be centralized, empowering each cost center with a self-serve approach. This fostered a culture of data analysis, enabling Nationwide to drill into a unified data set and use it for localized needs.
Andy Lomas, Product Owner: Budgeting, Planning, & Forecasting at Nationwide, notes:
“Some of the challenges facing Nationwide are in cost management. The Board platform is helping us with this by providing a single source of the truth around data and making sure we can visualize it in a single platform accessible to multiple users and who can drill through to the source data.”
Damien Mackman, Finance Business Partner at Nationwide, adds:
“Historically, we’ve had a lot of different spreadsheets flying around with a lack of control culture. Board reduces the reliance we have on spreadsheets and brings a level of simplicity where, if I want to do a simple plan, I can do a simple plan and if I want to do a detailed plan, I can do a detailed plan.”
An immediate impact: Board significantly reduces workforce allocation time
Nationwide has started seeing benefits since adopting Board. Notably, an immediate impact experienced is a reduction in workforce time allocation from 15 days to just 2-3 days. This significant decrease is due to the automation capabilities inherent in Board, eliminating the need for manual data uploads and reducing overall management effort.
Additional improvements include:
- a single source of truth
- the breaking down of siloed planning
- centralized data
- stronger collaboration underpinned by access to greater volumes of data
- enhanced governance, cost management, forecasting, and workforce planning
While most tools in the market offered an integrated approach via standardization, the Board solution allows Nationwide to bring segregated processes into a centralized system. Critically, the nuances required to maintain a certain degree of business logic remain available. The flexibility Board introduces allows individual processes to be applied while simultaneously integrating huge amounts of data from across the business.
Board introduces transparent, cost-conscious workforce planning
With workforce planning, Nationwide is now able to understand the rates charged by their temporary employees, how temps are used, and the cost of their lifecycle—something previously limited in terms of visibility or by conflicting data points experienced between procurement and finance.
Now, with workforce planning linked to its financial planning and budgeting process, Nationwide is better equipped to understand how many people they need to hire and what the financial impact of their decisions will be.
What’s next for Nationwide and Board?
Future plans include fully integrating with the source to pay system and automating operating cost forecasts to help simplify the activity. This will further expand to project forecasting and establishing more detailed planning capability. Ultimately, Nationwide are looking to manage about 80% of the cost management process wholly in Board.
Robert Swales, Senior Architect at Nationwide Building Society, concludes:
“It is exciting to see what we can do with Board. There are so many possibilities thanks to its flexibility, and we are looking forward to further leveraging it.”
