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Synergy

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

The Synergy Concept In its project management and implementation work, B-Plan has assisted hundreds of organisations to deploy IT solutions and achieve outstanding results. The experience gained from working with customers and listening to their needs, influences B-Plan's product development strategy; the result is a solution tailor-made to

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A true business solution should add value beyond supporting operational processes and presenting performance after the fact. Synergy takes you beyond that, being designed to integrate all the financial and operational information management of the enterprise. This unique approach facilitates delivery of accurate and comprehensive management information for decision-support.

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Synergy has been designed to support the organisation as a whole, allowing managers to add more value to their activities through driving up the quality of information and meeting deadlines right on time. Right every time.

meet user needs across all sectors. This strategy has enabled B-Plan to achieve a dominant market position in the public sector for Activity-Based-Costing, Budgeting and latterly Data Warehousing and on-line Benchmarking. Now, we present all of this integrated onto a single platform "The Synergy Environment".

Adding value to the organisation at a level beyond conventional business systems is Synergy's mission. It creates the opportunity for the organisation to respond more quickly to changing requirements and at the same time position the organisation to face the medium and long term. The result is a step change in the field of financial and information management..

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The Synergy solution benefits not only accountants and information specialists. Because modules are integrated and up-todate, information is delivered swiftly to the desktop. With Synergy, users will be able to receive and act upon more accurate and timely information that tells the "whole story". Synergy drives down information lead times. Keeping pace with evolving business requirements, web-based deployments of Synergy's analytical reporting have been developed to provide scaleable and costeffective access to Synergy modules over local networks and through the Internet. This equips Synergy users with the ability to use the functions and features in the most appropriate way to their needs. B-Plan is committed to deliver workable business solutions now and into the future.

Compas

Aptos - GL

FINANCIAL DATA

Payroll Data

Integral Budgeting & Modelling

Precision & ABC Costing

Compas Data Warehouse

ACTIVITY DATA

INSIGHT

With the Synergy environment it now becomes possible to identify and maximise new opportunities. At the heart of the Synergy suite of applications is the Synergy environment, transcending the traditional modular application concept through the delivery of a business-process oriented approach. With the architecture of Synergy, all activity in one module immediately updates other modules in real-time, removing the need to have to re-key or interface information.

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

Synergy

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

Future-Proof Technology

Synergy is built using a multi-tier architecture. As your business changes, away from character and desk based graphical user interfaces towards the Web, B-Plan can deliver within that changed way of working. We are committed to lead the way with the Synergy solution.

FD, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Belfast.

Fully Flexible Reporting Synergy not only has its own reporting and enquiry functions but it also has been built to work directly with other business intelligent and OLAP reporting tools such as BusinessObjects and Cognos. Also, B-Plan's own web-based reporting technology, Insight, sits alongside all of the Synergy applications. All the Synergy modules can readily import from and export information to Microsoft and Lotus products. Synergy delivers the right information, in the right way in an OPEN Systems environment. In order to deliver value-added management information, the diverse needs of the business demand more than reporting tools.

B-Plan's web-based reporting tool, Insight, utilises OLAP technologies to deliver integrated management information solutions that can be easily accessed, understood and exploited by all business users. Synergy delivers value through its architecture and technology. The results are outstanding. With the Synergy solution, you get a suite of business applications delivered via web or conventional client/server technologies. You get the fully integrated and easy-to-use management reporting mechanism and with a visionary R&D strategy committed to deliver immediate realtime updates across all Synergy applications. The information is produced at the right time in the right place.

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"The most important and notable benefit was the time the B-Plan solution saved us over the manual system. A large proportion of the management time has been freed up, allowing them to concentrate on strategic important tasks ."

Our confidence in delivering future-proof solutions is based on the strength of partnerships forged with our users. These partnerships ensure that our customers' developments and advances are reflected in the Synergy package in timescales that will always keep you current and fresh, ready to face today's demanding world. Synergy, through its technology, supports your investment decisions - it does not drive them!

Traditionally, the need for different analysis of core information has meant at worst re-keying data into external systems, and at best bolting on third-party applications and then struggling to resolve the resulting integration issues.

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"We were impressed by B-Plan's track record of providing the UK's major teaching hospitals with financial management solutions and support. B-Plan is clearly the leader in this area." University College London Hospitals

delivery of high quality client focused solutions that enable our customers to meet their strategic aims.

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In a volatile business world, one that is characterised by an accelerating pace of change, choosing the right strategic IT partner to help to introduce tighter financial controls and more focused operational management is critical. B-Plan is that partner, through its

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Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

The Synergy Application Suite Precision Activity-Based Costing Synergy is an integrated system with a consistent "look and feel". Clear navigation and menu structures guide users through the system, and, with the appropriate security measures in place, you have the peace of mind that information is restricted to user-defined

"We are impressed by the flexibility of B-Plan systems. Ease of data collection and importing saved a great deal of time." Guy's & St Thomas

business groups. Common functions, such as security, are defined just once through the System Manager module and then applied across the whole system, reducing both implementation timescales and costs. Synergy delivers intelligent system management.

The Synergy environment is a suite of client/server applications that exploit an advanced architecture to deliver the advantages of best practice in financial and information management, fully-optimised to deliver performance in both client/server and web environments. Synergy modules are used by a wide variety of organisations spanning both private and public sectors, including healthcare, education and police. Synergy delivers value whatever the sector.

Precision Costing Precision Costing supports the continued drive to more robust and detailed costs, giving a truly effective, accurate and flexible costing solution. Thus, decisions can be made on time and with confidence.

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

"B-Plan were able to work with us in providing a system which can cope not only with Top-Down cost allocation but also with Bottom-Up cost measurement." Ministry of Defence Secondary Care Agency.

Precision Costing supports: Full Cost Absorption Marginal Costing Process Costing Standard Costing Activity Based Costing Using Precision, users can ensure that all costs are recovered in a fully reconciled and controlled environment. It is compatible with all major report writers and allows for information exchange with all common business packages, such as Microsoft and Lotus products. Readily interfaceable with activity and financial systems, it has a number of automatic functions, e.g. Autoprofile which creates templates for activity based costing. Precision Costing is vital for effective decision making.

Precision Costing is easily adapted to different industries, and can be used to model an organisation's processes without having to resort to costly software customisation. Only Precision Costing can deliver the full range of costing functionality that your organisation needs.

module. At the same time the Pathology and Radiology departments at the hospital acquired B-Plan’s departmental costing solution.

Case Study

“Resource profiles for Pathology and Radiology now reflect the actual Pathology/Radiology costs by procedure and have significantly refined the Trust’s HRG costs. Few Trusts have this level of information but with B-Plan’s costing system this becomes a real possibility.” Service Manager for Radiology, St Mary’s Hospital.

St Mary’s NHS Trust is a major teaching hospital in West London serving patients from Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Health Authority, Ealing, Hounslow and Hammersmith, Brent and Harrow, and Camden and Islington Health Authorities. St Mary’s is an undergraduate teaching hospital that has academic links with Imperial College School of Medicine. The Trust serves around 340,000 local residents with over 2500 staff and 750 beds distributed over 2 sites; St Mary’s Paddington, and The Western Eye Hospital.

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The management accounting theorist Kaplan stated that "One costing system is not enough". With Precision one system is enough. The Precision Costing module incorporates the main costing methodologies within a single integrated environment, allowing for the production of costs from different perspectives from common financial and activity data.

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With extensive collaboration between St Mary’s NHS Trust and B-Plan, a comprehensive costing project was constructed that included a fully absorbed top-down module, very detailed bottom-up module and a fully reconcilable HRG

“B-Plan costing has enabled us to allocate consultant and nursing costs more accurately to complex procedures as opposed to averaging them over the total number of cases per room regardless of the case mix.”

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The Synergy Application Suite Integral Budgeting

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way that all resources are maximised, from human resources through to ledger, and provide integration with other business information systems. Integral Budgeting offers all of that and more.

Robust budget setting is crucial to the business planning process. Without the right tools, budgeting can be a time-consuming and potentially valueless process. The Integral Budgeting solution offers a practical and flexible tool to drive the budget-setting process, and to slash budget-setting timescales dramatically, delivering purpose and value to the budget setting process.

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One of the most challenging managerial objectives in a dynamic organisation, where changes occur within a short timeframe, is to develop a flexible budget model that mirrors the unique structure of an enterprise. At the same time that model must operate in such a

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Integral Budgeting supports: Incremental Budgeting Zero-Based Budgeting Activity-Based Budgeting Integral Budgeting offers the ability to hold multiple and multi-annual budgets for financial and statistical values. A number of users have adopted Synergy to support planning applications under the Private Finance Initiative. Budgets can be flexibly set at multiple levels holding information down to "payslip" level if required, offering a highly sophisticated build up of budgets, vital to promote ownership of budgets throughout all levels of the organisation and establish effective and meaningful financial control. Actual and historical budgeting information can be forecast to determine future requirements. Detailed adjustments can be made against specific costed items reflecting growth/retraction, increments and inflation and efficiency improvements. The total service can include automated update of national

Synergy

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

"B-Plan's system with its dynamic modelling capabilities has reduced budget setting timescales drastically and will provide the platform for responding quickly to change in the organisation to forecast future income and expenditure." Central Manchester Healthcare NHS Trust

audit trails for every single staff member in moments." Heather Lea, North East Wales NHS Trust

insurance tables etc. and a number of industry templates have been developed to support specific requirements such as national pay awards. Integral Budgeting delivers true functionality to the budget setting process.

Case Study North East Wales NHS Trust is a mixed acute, community and mental health trust providing health care to a ‘country’ population in over 120 sites throughout North East Wales With more than 5400 permanent staff and payroll costs accounting for some 75% of it’s £110M budget, monitoring, and more importantly, planning pay budgets accurately and efficiently is a priority for the finance department.

"Before B-Plan’s system was implemented, all budgeting, costing and pricing within the Trust was carried out using a large number of spreadsheets. It was an energy intensive and time consuming method. From the outset, we knew we wanted a flexible, efficient planning methodology to sit on top of our existing financial management systems.” “B-Plan's Budgeting system is all that and more. Feeding one way into our main ledger and the other into our B-Plan costing and pricing system, it streamlined every aspect of our payroll budget

processes. In fact you could say B-Plan's Budgeting hasn't just revolutionised our budgeting procedures. It has become key in focusing our overall business plan." "I'd say 80% of our staff data analysis is now automated. For the first time ever, all our budgeting information is stored in a single database, allowing us to draw on full

The finance function is under pressure to reduce transaction-processing time and costs. B-Plan has taken advantage of the latest trends in budgeting to deliver a system that will relieve these pressures. The Integral Budget Management module gives users full control and history of changes to budget, offering a much richer set of functions than would be available in a general ledger. The module also allows for the monitoring of budget versus actual at the "building block" level, giving the depth of variance analysis required to identify the real management action issues. Integral delivers the widest range of budget management capabilities.

Integral Modelling and Forecasting The Integral Modelling and Forecasting module accepts datasets from Budgeting, Budget Management and Costing and allows for the setting of rules and scenarios for modelling and forecasting integrated data, taking into account seasonal factors and other variables. It also allows for the import of actual data from ledgers and other business systems, and the identification of trends using regression analysis. Manage and understand the future better with Synergy Modelling and Forecasting.

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The Synergy Application Suite Compas Information Management Large and complex organisations collect a vast array and amount of data about their activities. Some would argue that very little of it turns into useful management information. Organisations also operate a range of systems

on differing platforms, with the data held in different forms. The Synergy Information Management module COMPAS addresses all of these issues.

COMPAS' powerful data warehousing functionality pulls data from disparate business systems and validates and organises it into an accessible form for reporting and analysis. COMPAS performs userdefined data validation and cleansing, producing exception reports which can be fed back instantaneously to the original business system to correct errors and data quality issues at source. Powerful rules-based sorting and assignment functions then standardise and group the data. The information is then assembled in Data Marts for analysis/report or onward transmission.

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COMPAS minimises the cost of data handling and maximises the resources available for decision support and analysis. A task scheduling function even automates the data warehousing process itself. Compas makes data accessible and improves its quality, thereby extending the life and maximising the benefit of legacy systems

Compas

Available on Windows NT and UNIX, COMPAS can be based upon either of the Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) Oracle or MS SQL. A pre-built core system database is available for use in any Data

Synergy

Integrated Financial and Operational Business Solutions

"Our organisation has a budget of over £150million a year and 4,500 staff. We have been using B-Plan's data warehouse and management information system Compas for five years to make sense of our operational data and to add value to our existing IT investment. Without Compas it would have been impossible to have confidence in the true position and to plan for the future." Director of Information: Royal Victoria Infirmary-Belfast

Case study The Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin The Mater Misericordiae Hospital is a large and prestigious teaching hospital in Dublin. It is a National centre of excellence for cardiothoracic surgery and spinal injuries and a Regional centre for five other services. It has an international reputation for its health care information systems.

Warehouse/Mart commercial environment. Since the system is designed using a modular approach, the database can be augmented to the customer's specific requirements. The COMPAS interface is a thin-client implementation, designed to interface with the desktop. By using a soft-coded approach it is possible for the client to specify what views of data are available from which data sources. A modular application tree design allows the system administrator to configure access to the COMPAS interface for each specific user. System applications such as e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, etc can also be executed from within the COMPAS virtual desktop.

Stringent new deadlines and tremendous pressure on services and budgets convinced hospital managers that they must invest in an easy to use and interactive corporate Management Information System. Their priority was to get fast and easy access to information on bed-use, use of services, patient waiting times and treatment costs. Following an extensive competitive procurement process the Mater chose B-Plan's Compas datawarehouse and M.I.S. Key to B-plan's success was the ability to integrate and analyse data from many different sources and to provide comprehensive, credible data at the desktop of users for many different disciplines.

The planned benefits for the hospital include an enormous improvement in data quality, automatic production of standard reports and drill down facility to the underlying data including data on individual patients. The Compas solution adds value to the operational components by identifying the lowest level of detail within the context of the bigger picture. Alternatively, you can start with a broad overview and drilldown to those areas that appear out of line. As variations to plans occur the user can even have exception reports automatically triggered and sent as an instant alert to possible problems.

"Using a Data Warehouse with BusinessObjects supplied by BPlan has enabled us to create an exceptionally successful information system which integrates information from our hospitals, community and health authority and delivers it to their desktops and to the Primary Care Trusts across NHSnet." Scunthorpe and Goole Hospitals NHS Trust

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The Synergy Application Suite Insight On-line Reporting & Benchmarking not enough to just measure internal performance without reference to the peer group. Fast entering the management lexicon of today are sector measures such as Earnings Per Share or Return on Capital, normalised mortality rates or GCSE pass rates and Benchmarking is now entering the premier league of management controls.

B-Plan's powerful web-based reporting technology allows users to select their own drill-paths, and selection/exception criteria. The technology also supports graphical functions and exports information to Microsoft Excel for further local analysis. The service is userfriendly and requires only the minimum of

Web-based Benchmarking Organisations are often poorly placed to provide explanations for differing levels of performance because they do not have easy access to comparative information at peer group level. As a result, a cottage industry has grown up providing benchmarking services. However, while much useful work has been done, this industry has, so far, been characterised by cumbersome and clerically intensive data collection and reporting methods. Inevitably with traditional collection and reporting methods, there is a trade-off between speed, flexibility, cost and the level of detail that can be supported. Valid interpretations and conclusions from this information are usually only possible where an integrated and comprehensive approach is taken down to an appropriate level of detail. At B-Plan we recognised that, by using appropriate technology, it would be possible to design benchmarking and performance management tools that would allow faster data collection and reporting. Also, if users were able to make maximum use of data within their existing financial and activity systems, there would be less need for users to collect or calculate additional information. The objective

Using the latest technology, B-Plan, in partnership with its users, has pushed back the boundaries of benchmarking and performance management allowing opportunities for instant results and flexible reporting to new levels of detail. The level of information provided by Insight is essential for the purposes of planning and comparison, but above all for providing swift responses to questions arising in the areas of comparative cost and operational efficiency. With Insight, control is given back to the manager as opposed to being left in the hands of third parties such as management consultants.

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Through its web-based reporting tool, the Synergy suite of applications supports benchmarking within and between organisations. Developed as an in-house reporting system by B-Plan, Insight is now being used to deliver benchmarking services for more than fifty public sector clients.

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was therefore to develop a service which automatically collected and utilised information from existing activity and financial databases.

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training and guidance to start extracting vital information on comparative performance and cost management. The Insight reporting tool truly delivers insights into your organisation and beyond.

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The Insight reporting suite within Synergy sits above the data warehousing and repository layers, and utilises a set of OLAP cubes and its own reporting tool. Accessible via a web browser it delivers all the benchmarking functionality that you could ever want. In order to overcome the problem of comparability, B-Plan has developed a powerful extraction engine which intelligently maps the organisation's own data to the appropriate fields within the repository. The advantage of the web-browser approach is that the data and reporting tools are all held on a central web server and all the user requires is Internet access to be able to benefit from the system.

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B-Plan continually researches key areas of change within the finance and information management function. Traditional roles are changing, with the finance function moving from being a data provider to becoming an adviser to the business. In particular, financial managers need a way to introduce benchmarking into their financial analysis; it is

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Training and Learning

B-Plan Information Systems Ltd Home of Synergy and Aptos

B-Plan takes a focused and objectives-based approach to training and learning support services for customers and partners.

Founded in 1993, B-Plan develops, markets and supports a family of financial, analytical and operational software solutions for use in multiple sectors in the UK and international markets. The company has a particularly strong presence in healthcare, police, education, retail, financial services, insurance

Our experienced Professional Services Consultants present all of the classroom sessions, workshops, seminars and formal training courses. They are also the key resource in the development of our CD-ROM/Web based programmes. On a daily basis their jobs involve them in the real-life implementation of Synergy and the provision of software, technical or project consultancy. So attendees can be confident that somebody is delivering the course with first hand experience of the subject under consideration. To make the whole process efficient, effective and economical, we use proven Accelerated Learning techniques and comprehensive evaluation methods. This leads to high knowledge retention/use for the learners and quantifiable results for the business. Our training services can be delivered either at our own high quality training facilities at our Basingstoke or Manchester offices or at a suitable venue selected by the customer. B-Plan's professionally qualified and accredited personnel,

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Getting the right people the right training to deliver business benefit is the key to success.

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Whether this requires standard classroom courses, bespoke courses, CD-ROM/Web based activities and/or coaching, the training and learning support services make all the difference.

working with leading edge performance management tools, deliver all application environment related aspects of the Synergy suite. The service starts at hardware selection and sizing through to full 24 by 7 operational support services and can optionally include facilities management services. With these world class services you can be confident of achieving sustained performance from your Synergy investment.

and consumer products sectors. The software solutions are supported by a range of professional services including implementation, consultancy, change management, migration, training & related services.

The acquisition of the Aptos Financial Solutions business from Walker Interactive Inc. in October 2000 was a significant step forward for B-Plan. Synergy and Aptos now form the core of the company’s strategy, providing a strong platform for growth in the pan-European financial systems and services market. B-Plan has already been marketing Aptos since 1997 and successfully implemented the solution into some of the world’s leading teaching hospitals. Aptos Smart Business Solutions complement the B-Plan Synergy

range of products and services, enabling the company to deliver fully integrated enterprise wide solutions more effectively. B-Plan’s unique approach in responding to the needs of its customers has been fundamental to its continuing success. Working in partnership with customers, B-Plan is committed to innovative solutions that support and enhance its clients’ business. In this way B-Plan strives to be the company that delivers high quality, client focused solutions.