THE NEWS INFORMATION FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Fall 2011 | VOLUME 22

Program Update

A Closer Look at Performance Budgeting

AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting provides measurable results utilizing real-time budget formulation, analysis, reporting and monitoring. With each new AMS Advantage release, enhancements continue to add new functionality, making it more powerful, flexible and user-friendly. This is particularly true for AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting. We have continuously enhanced the solution while maintaining the benefits and features you require. AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting now provides the following functionality you may not be utilizing:

Additional Features

The following features simplify setup and processes, and provide efficiency, effectiveness and usability by empowering the end user:

  Key Functionality Benefits
Performance Management
  • Establishes and tracks performance throughout the year in a consolidated manner.
  • Defines strategic plans. Pre-built yet flexible to define for diverse user groups. Associates weighting to allow for "score carding" of progress.
  • Defines performance measures, establishes thresholds, milestones, and assigns responsibility.
  • Tracks performance measure targets/actuals using budget forms and captures status updates and progress towards milestones.
  • Prebuilt calculations and reports calculate the cost of providing the services identified.
  • Helps make improved funding choices based on program results by easily presenting performance information alongside budget amounts.
  • Creates and aligns budget with performance plan throughout the year to report on costs in conjunction with their achievement purposes.
  • Allows decision makers to more readily see which expenditures drive increased performance and which do not.
Dashboard Capability
  • Creates a central repository available to users at various levels of the organization.
  • Provides real time reporting for financial data, position data, and performance data.
  • Interactive dashboards use graphs, charts, and tables to display the information in a consolidated manner.
  • Drilldown capability across views allows users to easily see details.
  • Dashboards visualize performance, providing actionable intelligence to management throughout the year.
  • Provides users the ability to make better-informed decisions by providing all critical information in one place.
  • Empowers effective decision-making by enabling users to identify issues early and thereby taking corrective action earlier than previously possible.
  • Helps make improved funding choices based on program results by easily presenting performance information alongside budget amounts.

Enhanced Functionality

The following enhancements provide a more robust and configurable solution:

  Key Functionality Benefits
Salary and Benefits Forecasting Functionality
  • Models scenarios to forecast budget data for future budget cycles without impacting underlying data.
  • Supports unlimited number of user defined "what if" scenarios for up to 60 years.
  • Highly configurable date effective personnel tables.
  • Improves processing capability enabling users to run salary projections in reduced time.
  • Improves decision making capabilities by allowing users to compare and analyze scenarios side by side over multiple years to see the short and long term impacts of each option.
  • Increases automation, efficiency, and flexibility.

Strength in Capital Budgeting

  • Supports unique characteristics: data entry format, data requirements, workflow, security, and audit for Capital specific processes.
  • Provides configurable fields to capture the project related information specific to each client site.
  • Simplifies the Capital Budgeting setup dramatically cutting down the time to create a capital budget.
Enhanced Narrative Capability
  • Adds detailed justifications and explanations through free form text, documents, and attachments that can be added anywhere in the application.
  • Provides full audit trial capability to capture all changes throughout the budget process, both numeric and text changes.
  • Provides ability to see all previous versions of the budget as they were submitted.
  • Supports user defined formatting and spell check.
  • Improves communication and collaboration by providing users the ability to add justification, explanation and status.
  • Text handling options reduces customization and configuration saving time and creating greater efficiencies.

In fact, our enhanced AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting solution was recently praised by Gartner in its "Critical Capabilities for Government Budget Planning Products" report published on September 7, 2011.

With our enhanced solution, successful implementation record, and strong partnerships, our AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting family continues to grow. This is evident by the following recent successful implementations:

  • Pima County (July 2011)
  • City of Cincinnati (July 2011)
  • City of Midland (August 2011)
  • City of Mesa (November 2011)
  • City of Tucson (November 2011)
  • We're making judgment calls, interpreting data, and not just compiling the data. That saved us thousands of hours, but it also yielded us a much better product in terms of our budget office's recommendations to the county manager.

    Johnna Rogers, Deputy County Manager and Chief Financial Officer,
    Wake County, NC

    If you would like more information on the enhanced AMS Advantage Performance Budgeting solution, please contact Louise Oliver at louise.oliver@cgi.com.