The Easts Group incorporates the Sydney Roosters as well as a Registered Club which operates four venues across the Sydney area – Easts at Bondi Junction, the Waverley Bowling & Recreation Club, Kingswood Sports Club and Berkeley Sports Club.
Across these locations, the Group and its staff provide a wide range of facilities to its members – including bars, restaurants, gaming lounges, function rooms and health and sporting facilities.
Operating in a highly competitive market, it is important for the Group to maintain a close eye on all business units for review of KPIs for each of its facilities. This enables it to respond promptly to changing demands – through member promotions and marketing, improved management of its existing operations and longer-term planning for potential new facilities and upgrades.
Business Challenge
The Easts Group of Clubs wanted to better understand activities undertaken by its members, so it could respond quickly to demand trends. It needed to simplify reporting of data from multiple different IT systems, so managers could spend more time on productive analysis.
Solution
The Group collaborated with Cornerstone, an IBM® Business Partner, to develop streamlined reporting based on IBM Cognos® Express – creating a ‘single point of truth’ and reducing effort generating reports so more time can be spent on analysis of data.
Member wants and needs
The Group strives to achieve a better understanding of the mix of activities undertaken by its members and their guests to provide improved facilities for patrons and it was believed that this could be achieved by rationalising the variety of data stored under its variety of information platforms. Reviewing the data was time consuming. Adding to the difficulty, each area is managed by a different computer system and data collation took even more time to perform.
Business Benefits
Cornerstone, a trusted partner
The Group initially engaged Cornerstone, a specialist in best practice Business Analytic solutions, to efficiently encapsulate all information about business activities into a single report.
Scott Macdonald, The Group’s Chief Financial Officer, says, “Our goal was to work smarter, not harder. We needed a single point of reference to better understand our members’ activities.”
Cornerstone led the Group through a design and analysis process that culminated in the release of a series of weekly reports, delivered over the intranet and email. Subsequently, iterative improvements – by both Cornerstone and internal Group resources – have fine-tuned these reports to closely meet the continually evolving needs of the business.
“Our goal was to work smarter, not harder. We needed a single point of truth to better understand our members.” —Scott MacDonald, Chief Financial Officer, Easts Group
IBM Cognos Express
The solution Cornerstone designed is based on IBM Cognos Express, utilising the Reporter and Xcelerator modules. IBM Cognos consolidates business data from a variety of different IT systems to provide a consolidated view.
Implementation of IBM Cognos has provided the Group with the new ability to:
With a user-friendly interface, their new streamlined reporting solution has the potential to greatly increase productivity within Group management.
Solutions Components Software
Beyond productivity
Since implementation of its new reporting system, the Group has seen significant reductions in the time taken to produce reports, but the implications go beyond saving time to increased business responsiveness and better decision making.
Consolidated business data provides managers with an in-depth understanding of why members visit their club – and how they use it. For example, analysis of the detailed purchase history within one of the Club restaurants prompted the changing of opening hours – which has resulted in a better return on the facility.
According to Scott Macdonald, “The business has certainly saved a lot of the time that we used to spend generating weekly and monthly reports. However, there’s potential for even greater returns from being able to make changes to the business as the result of analysing the data now easily available to us.”
Piers Wilson of Cornerstone says that IBM’s Cognos solution had previously only been available to large enterprises. “We’ve now delivered numerous Business Analytics solutions for mid-sized organisations using IBM Cognos Express, which was specifically developed for their needs and budgets. Having helped the Easts Group tackle reporting and analytics, we are extending the solution to automate their budgeting and forecasting processes in the future.”
Talk to us about your information management challenges