If you do not know how your business is performing, it is extremely difficult - if not impossible - to improve performance. This is a commonly known challenge for many businesses regardless of size and structure. At SKAT, Danish Tax and Customs Administration, management have a fairly precise picture of how the organisation performs. Quite literally since performance data from SKAT’s six regions are presented in a beautifully designed dashboard that offers at-a-glance performance data, complete with benchmarking against pre-defined targets. All thanks to SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise, a visualisation tool for SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, delivered by Affecto.

Affecto the natural choice

SKAT has used SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise from Affecto for many years so choosing Xcelsius as the tool and Affecto as the partner was more or less obvious: “Affecto are really strong on SAP BusinessObjects and we have worked with them for several years. Xcelsius is a part of the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. It was the natural choice for us,” says Eskild Linde Nielsen, chief consultant at SKAT’s Business Intelligence Competence Centre (BICC).

BICC is part of SKAT’s central administration. Pulling data from some 60-plus legacy systems via the data
warehouse and SAP Business Objects Enterprise, Xcelsius aggregates information such as tax and duties
collection performance, service levels, number of pending cases, time spent on advising companies and individuals and a wide range of other KPIs. Once a month Xcelsius generates an updated performance dashboard that is published on SKAT’s intranet.

“The information provided is mainly relevant for directors and controllers in charge of delegating resources, a total of 200 people or so. But everyone in our organisation, around 8,000 employees, can access the dashboard if they want to see how their region performs compared to other regions,”explains Eskild Linde Nielsen.

Customised design

One of the key features of Xcelsius is the ability to customise the dashboard design to create exactly the desired visualisation. SKAT has chosen to work with three basic colours: Green, yellow and red to clearly indicate if a specific figure is on target. SKAT also chose to divide performance data into several pages on the dashboard, the front page offering data on the 20 most important targets and sub pages offering deeper insights on even more parameters, a total of 50.

“With the Xcelsius dashboard our directors and controllers have quick and easy access to management information that facilitate decision making at an earlier stage.” says Eskild Linde Nielsen.

Easy to maintain

“We are very satisfied with the solution. It fully lives up to our expectations. With the Xcelsius dashboard our directors and controllers have quick and easy access to management information that facilitate decision making at an earlier stage. Redirecting resources and following up can be done much faster,” says Eskild Linde Nielsen.

He also points out that, once installed and configured correctly, Xcelsius is easy to maintain and develop: “The system is maintained by one full-time employee here at BICC. That is quite cost-effective.”

Up for the task

As of end 2010, SKAT’s Xcelsius solution mainly provides performance data from the six regions with each region represented as one single business unit. However, following user requests and management requirements, Eskild Linde Nielsen and his team will initiate further development in 2011. The goal?
 To pull and visualise data on a deeper level, offering even more localised management information.