Creating community value leveraging data and insights

This client is a US-based consortium of nonprofit organizations. Their mission is to improve the performance of their children services by leveraging scale and best practices to reduce back-office costs and direct funding towards community services.

Challenge

This consortium of nonprofit organizations was spending high amount of program funding dollars towards program administration, including finance and accounting. This challenge was further aggravated by their lack of ability to attract and retain talent resulting in frequent staff rotation. Their processes carried high amount of inefficiencies, lacked standardization and discipline. They encountered frequent delays in their month-end close and financial reporting, which resulted in auditor and funder dissatisfaction.

Solution

Working closely together, EXL and the client mapped out a game plan to set up back-office shared services. This enabled EXL to bring in sophistication, maturity and discipline to business process management across all corresponding member organizations. EXL leveraged its experts across operations, compliance, transformation and digital to make significant improvements across operations, governance, risk, compliance, control and quality.

For operations and governance, EXL brought in experienced team members with the ability to work across all of the finance and accounting functions. EXL assumed complete ownership of deliverables, including the finalization of financials. In addition, EXL developed a pool of functional experts within the client’s relevant teams to implement best practices and drive transformation initiatives. With EXL’s collaboration, a robust governance model with daily, weekly, and monthly governance checks was also calendared and operationalized.

In terms of risk, control and quality, a robust framework was deployed to increase accuracy and compliance. Periodic reporting on performance and quality metrics was also established with a detailed comparison and benchmarking of metrics. EXL was able to execute a timely and expedited period end close, with accelerated and clean audits through simplified and reliable reports.

For the client’s transformation initiatives, EXL standardized processes through the use of various digital platforms and point solutions. Over 40 projects on process standardization were completed through a combination of elimination, consolidation and sharing of best practices. Together, EXL and the client were also able to successfully execute over 20 automation initiatives.

Outcomes

The continuous improvements that EXL implemented delivered over 20% efficiency gains across various member agencies. The 40+ standardization projects were delivered through a combination of elimination, consolidation and best practices. 20+ automation were implemented across transactional processes using point automations resulting into additional saving. Overall, EXL’s partnership resulted in over two major outcomes:

• 50% improvement in ratio of funding dollars towards the programs of participating agencies versus finance & accounting costs
• Timely and accurate financial reporting improved the funders and auditors confidence which further helped in securing additional funding dollars