Steve Rowan, Chief Financial Officer at RPC discusses how BigHand Business Intelligence has created a culture of financial understanding at the firm.

We're using the Business Intelligence tool which we rolled out firm-wide about three years ago. We wanted to have real-time information for our partners, increasing accountability and responsibility. Having first worked with our finance reporting team, and then partners, we had KPIs that we wanted to be able to track. The data is real-time and allows partners to take responsibility for and act on the data that's been provided. You are the owner of your business.

We're seeing much greater involvement in terms of decisions on the financing of the practice. We’ve been able to take away some of the excuses that previously existed about the data being out of date, inaccurate etc. The tool has been very good, and we are very happy with it.

What advice would you give to other firms?

The basic advice would be to come and talk to us and see some of the benefits we've seen through the BigHand Business Intelligence. BigHand were particularly helpful for us in setting up the cubes in the way that we wanted to manage our business, and very helpful and responsive in terms of getting development through to finality and then roll out. The demand for real-time information is not going to go away, it's going to increase. The more up-to-date the data the more trustworthy it is. So yes, I would say come and talk to us and don't delay.

What are your predicted industry challenges?

I think the biggest challenge that we have at the moment is how to achieve more for less. That is finding out how can we use our resources more efficiently. How can we supply our services that are at a value and price point that the clients want, but also deliver a suitable level of profitability for our firm? It's developing a further partnership with our clients so that it isn't so transactional. We know our clients need to make money, and we want to make money too, but it's about working together to get the efficiency that our clients want at the right price.

The technology is giving us information from which we can have a conversation. Through the BigHand BI that we're using, we're able to link in with other collaborative collaboration platforms to enable our clients to see what's going on, which aids trust and can help with conversations.