Situation

The County of Berks’ Operating and Capital Budgeting solution was built on Oracle’s sophisticated Hyperion Planning technology, though Position Budgeting was still completed manually using spreadsheets, leading to cumbersome performance and maintenance issues. The County required an upgrade of its existing budgeting and reporting solution, including the implementation of Position Budgeting in one centralized application in order to improve performance, accuracy, and address the following challenges:

  • Manual, cumbersome, and decentralized budgeting processes using Excel spreadsheets for Position Budgeting
  • Manual tracking and syncing of changes to spreadsheets
  • Delays in the budgeting process due to inefficient communication between departments
  • Complex backup and restore procedures

The County’s objective was to adopt a robust cloud solution to improve performance and reduce overall maintenance, while retaining the functions necessary for its business operations in a single, unified solution.

I sincerely want to thank you…for your efforts to learn the Berks’ business process and help deliver a solution that provides the efficiency and automation that we needed. I was very impressed with your ability to understand our needs and I absolutely appreciate your diligence, determination and patience throughout this project. All of your hard work has led to the success of this project and I truly, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate your efforts and I enjoyed working with you. This project was far more difficult than implementing Hyperion and I can’t thank the entire team at AST enough.”

Laura Jones Budget Administrator, County of Berks
Let’s Create Progress Together!

I sincerely want to thank you…for your efforts to learn the Berks’ business process and help deliver a solution that provides the efficiency and automation that we needed. I was very impressed with your ability to understand our needs and I absolutely appreciate your diligence, determination and patience throughout this project. All of your hard work has led to the success of this project and I truly, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate your efforts and I enjoyed working with you. This project was far more difficult than implementing Hyperion and I can’t thank the entire team at AST enough.”

Laura Jones Budget Administrator, County of Berks

Solutions & Benefits

The County of Berks partnered with AST to perform a ‘lift and shift’ of its on-premise Operating and Capital budgeting modules to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS), as well as implement a Position Budgeting module in PBCS, in order to standardize and centralize its planning, forecasting, and reporting operations. AST provided technical expertise to enable the County with user-friendly interfaces for creating budgets and reporting actuals, streamline the tracking and syncing of changes from other departments, establish Single Sign-On (SSO) and seamless integration, and provide effective knowledge transfer.

AST’s solution has led the County of Berks to achieve the following key benefits:

  • 100% centralized access to Operating, Capital, and Position-related budget data
  • 100% automation of existing processes related to Position Control Budgeting
  • 80% reduction in Position Control Budgeting time and instance refresh processes
Industry: Public Sector

Solution Components:

  • Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service
why ast poster why ast poster

Why AST?


AST’s expertise with Oracle PBCS transformed the County’s budgeting and forecasting systems by migrating to the cloud and providing an automated, modern, and unified solution to eliminate manual errors and significantly reduce maintenance costs.