About Morgan Sindall
Morgan Sindall Group is a leading UK construction and regeneration business operating across multiple sectors and industries in the UK. They maintain a balanced business geared towards increasing demand for affordable housing, urban regeneration and infrastructure and construction investment.
Morgan Sindall faced a number of challenges:
- A complicated company structure; particularly within the Investments Division
- The use of historic company journals within their IBM Cognos Controller solution meant a lack of visibility of the final numbers
- The Investments Division was disbanded as part of a last-minute decision late last year
… This last-minute decision meant there was a requirement to update their Consolidation solution.
Enter, HAYNE Solutions
Having worked together for many years, Morgan Sindall reached out to HAYNE as their trusted IBM Cognos Controller support partner. HAYNE reviewed the project requirements and desired outcomes to identify what needed to be done.
There was a requirement to simplify their investment register and push company journals into the reported numbers. Morgan Sindall was unsure how to do this.
Ben Slingsby, Financial Reporting Manager comments:
“HAYNE was able to untangle a web we had built up over many years. The project itself had a number of complications initially which HAYNE helped us overcome. HAYNE was quick to initiate the project with the quick assembling of a team, the test environment, and a project plan”.
HAYNE had initial meetings with Morgan Sindall to understand their company structure and associated journals as well as what was needed to move to other divisions within the group.
Ben continues:
“HAYNE looked under the bonnet to help us understand some of the more complicated configurations and provided the technical guidance on how to reconfigure our systems. They considered the end to end requirements and how to link Controller to CDM”.
HAYNE & Morgan Sindall – The Relationship
This project reinforced the relationship between HAYNE and Morgan Sindall. The two organisations were on the same page throughout the project.
Ben continues
“HAYNE was very accommodating from the very beginning.
Gabriela was an excellent project manager, proving key with the short timeframe.
Nilesh was excellent and had extensive knowledge of Controller and was extremely patient with us throughout. If we ever needed any Controller work done in the future, then I would be delighted to work with Nilesh.
Katy was helpful on the CDM piece, made time for our questions, and understood the importance of ensuring this would work prior to Half Year results”.
Outcomes
The key result for Morgan Sindall is that they were able to reconfigure their consolidation system in a short time frame in order to report their Half Year results under the new segmental structure.
Ben finally adds:
“We first started discussing this project in January of 2021, but the detailed discussion did not happen until around April/May time. Following these discussions, HAYNE was able to get this project over the line by the end of June. I was very impressed with how quickly HAYNE was able to turn this project around.”
Morgan Sindall now has fewer journals in the system and fewer entities meaning less reporting packs. This simplification in reporting means there is less to input which saves Morgan Sindall time. They also have greater visibility over what is happening.
Summary
Morgan Sindall now has an improved Controller solution which has been adapted to reflect their new company structure.
The development and reconfiguration of this solution allowed Morgan Sindall to report a new segmental structure.
As a result of HAYNE’s efforts, Morgan Sindall also has a greater understanding of Cognos Controller as a whole.