Inspiring engagement and accountability at Sammons Financial Group
Key results snapshot
Eliminated external consulting support for previous expense planning and reporting application, resulting in annual operating expense savings of $100,000.
Reduced the preparation time for annual expense planning by 90%, achieving annual labor efficiency savings of $60,000.
Eliminated 8 working days per month by automating monthly project tracking and reporting, generating $30,000 in labor efficiency savings annually.
Who is Sammons Financial Group?
Sammons Financial Group (SFG) is comprised of financial companies which include some of the most enduring and stable businesses in the insurance industry. Those brands include Midland National Life Insurance Company and North American Company for Life and Health Insurance. Through its member companies, SFG offers some of the most sought-after life insurance, annuity, and retirement planning products. SFG member companies provide value in the products and services they offer, while together, they represent a history of strength and longevity.
Business challenges
The team at Sammons Financial Group (SFG) faced inefficiencies and challenges related to technology that was unreliable at times and created an over-reliance on manual, time-consuming Excel-based processes. The company also needed to address the inability to update or change inflexible application functionality without external technical support. These challenges created numerous inefficiencies that needed to be addressed.
Applications deployed
Prophix One Financial Planning & Analysis
System integrations
The expense allocation process is the crown jewel (in my opinion) in our Prophix toolkit. There are many intricate subprocesses and calculations that aren’t tied to our general ledger accounts. That was the trick in building it out, but it really is a strategic advantage for SFG in how we accurately and transparently allocate expenses to business units and product lines.
Jodi Schultz
Associate Vice President of Finance, Sammons Financial Group Inc.
Why Prophix®
Sammons Financial Group sought an agile finance platform with improved insight and accuracy. They also sought out a solution that would allow them to automate their processes, while accommodating business growth. After considering multiple Financial Performance Management (FPM) vendors, SFG selected Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform.
Here’s why:
- With Prophix One, SFG can continuously innovate and expand, automating their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting for greater accuracy and efficiency.
- Prophix One significantly shortened their month-end reporting cycle, providing greater insight into their financials.
- By using Prophix One, SFG can streamline and expedite their monthly expense allocations and project tracking, eliminating time-consuming manual data entry across multiple Excel workbooks.
- Prophix One is intuitive for non-finance users, fostering collaboration and accountability while empowering stakeholders throughout the company.
Key results
The FP&A team at SFG improved the accuracy and efficiency of their planning and reporting processes, saving several days of manual effort each month. They were also able to reduce the amount of time and effort required for their annual budgeting and planning cycle across several months.
By adopting Prophix One for a wide range of tasks — including budgeting, forecasting, reporting, compensation planning, prepaid expense tracking, project tracking, expense allocations, and variance explanation capture — SFG was able to generate more value in less time.
Prophix One™ enables Sammons Financial Group to:
Reduce the preparation time for the annual expense allocation plan cycle by 75%, from two months to two weeks, resulting in an annual labor efficiency savings of $10,000.
Reduce the monthly expense allocation and prepaid expense accounting processes by 75%, allowing each process to be completed in a quarter of the time and resulting in an annual labor efficiency savings of $10,000.
Increase accuracy in allocations and speed up monthly close tasks, gaining insight into their numbers faster by reducing the duration of monthly reporting and tracking processes.
Significantly shorten the time required for annual planning preparation, including expense planning, expense allocations, and compensation planning, as well as improve the turnaround time for these processes.
Enhance confidence and expand access for users with built-in automation and validation to meet their stakeholders’ needs.
Empower users and facilitate broader participation in monthly reporting and annual planning processes.
Encourage greater accountability in budget and expense management, by having team members personally manage and monitor their expenses through an intuitive, easy-to-use tool, making them more engaged in the financial planning process.
Continuously expand by supporting the development of new models and processes, with the only limitation being the time the team dedicates to exploring new and innovative ways to utilize Prophix.
in action
