Browne Jacobson and ICit

Delivering productivity, accuracy, and enhanced reporting for one of the Top 50 law firms in the UK.

Background

Browne Jacobson is a well-established, UK law firm focused on tackling some of society’s biggest issues, working with its clients to make a real difference across more than 12 different markets in both public and private sectors. The firm is showing strong growth, recently opening two new offices in Dublin and Cardiff, and generating turnover of over £100 million, placing it in the top 50 law firms in the country.

Business challenge

With old models previously in place, manual, spreadsheet-based planning consumed a great deal time of both the data analyst responsible (and the wider commercial finance team) and added extra complexity to company-wide reporting. Functionality at Browne Jacobson was largely Excel-based, mainly manual, and involved regularly consolidating a lot of files.

Deployment

ICit Business Intelligence worked closely with the team at Browne Jacobson to roll out Workday Adaptive Planning, primarily used by the commercial finance teams for budgeting and forecasting in these early deployment stages, with plans to further expand use in the coming months.

Business benefits

• Enhanced productivity for business team
• Faster and smarter reporting across the business
• Significant time savings which have freed staff to focus on higher value tasks
• Company-wide trust in the information leading to greater efficiencies across the business

Business challenge story

Version control challenges

As Head of Commercial Finance, responsible for financial systems and processes at Browne Jacobson, Mark Johnson oversees a team of six within a wider finance function. Most recently, a part of his role was to look for new ways to optimise business processes and increase efficiencies across the FP&A function, allowing users in his team to be freed from menial and time-consuming data processing tasks and set to work on higher value tasks.

Prior to using Workday Adaptive Planning, which went live after a two-month implementation process, on time and to budget, the team was managing multiple linked Excel models leaving them with the constant challenge of version control and exposed to potential inaccuracies. Although Johnson states that ‘accuracy wasn’t the main driver for change’, it was the sheer time that his team were spending on budgeting and reporting that pushed him to look for a better solution.

Transformation story

Teach a man to fish

Following the selection of Workday Adaptive Planning after a competitive review, ICit Business Intelligence was referred as the partner for implementation and has been instrumental in helping the Browne Jacobson team deploy the product and become self-sufficient in managing and developing it.

The immediate priority of the implementation team was to make Workday Adaptive Planning the firm’s primary sources of data input and reporting across many areas of the business, creating a solid foundation for the budgeting and forecasting process.

“Timing was very important for us, we wanted to get Workday Adaptive Planning set up and running for this year’s budget process,” Johnson explained.

According to Johnson, Workday Adaptive Planning stood out in terms of its usability – with features like OfficeConnect leveraging users’ familiarity with Excel to gain strong employee buy-in. It also offered him and his team the flexibility to work alongside ICit to do some of the early stage development work in-house.

With an aggressive plan to get the first stage implementation in place in time for their next budgeting and planning phase, Johnson explained that the team was slightly overwhelmed at first “as there was lots to get into”.

To ensure deadlines were met in good time, ICit put two consultants onto the project immediately, who guided the appointed team at Browne Jacobson through the process and allowed the team to get some early hands-on experience of using the product.

Johnson believes this close guidance has been really valuable in the early stages, as there are areas that it was really important that his team was able to manage themselves moving forward.

Results story

A company-wide impact and future benefits in store

With Workday Adaptive Planning in place, Excel version-control issues are a thing of the past, with the finance team now working from a single source of truth.

“Having faith in the process is a relief,” explains Johnson.

There are now plans to focus on ensuring Browne Jacobson can improve reporting into the senior leadership team, and for Workday Adaptive Planning to become the “go-to” resource in the future.

The highly intuitive interface will likely make business model reporting accessible to many audiences across the business, a huge benefit for legal businesses where fees are charged by the hour.

The overall impact has been to streamline processes to free users to work on more important jobs for the business.

“It’s all about creating efficiencies and improving processes,” he concludes. “Already there are many things we could not have done the way we do them if it wasn’t for Workday Adaptive Planning.