A management dashboard for SERIT SICILIA

SERIT SICILIA’s main task is administering the collection of revenue and taxes in the nine provinces of Sicily. The company has more than 1,000 employees and is owned by Riscossioni Sicilia and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. The tax base consists of nearly 5 million people, which means that every year, approximately 2.5 million documents are processed electronically. 

To ensure proper management, SERIT SICILIA needed a management-control system that allowed it to verify collection processes, monitor business activity and implement any corrective actions. They chose SAS® Financial Management. 

“SAS has been our partner for many years,” says Luigi Tagliavita, Director, Information Systems Office of SERIT SICILIA. “We are familiar with product characteristics and over time our staff has been trained in this technology. The most logical choice, therefore, was to entrust SAS with this initiative. 

“Our infrastructure consists of 1,052 desktop computers, 20 servers on the Windows platform and an IBM mainframe, located at the main headquarters in Florence, which is in charge of collection management,” says Tagliavita. “Over the years we have developed a series of applications – in addition to this main procedure – and the consequence was the creation of two entities that had difficulties communicating. Furthermore, everything that pertains to our business is carried out on two different platforms, and extracting data for management had become a truly critical operation.” 

With the contribution of three internal staff members supported by three outside consultants, SERIT SICILIA began to set up the new system.

“Over a one-and-a-half-year period,” says Tagliavita, “we were able to extract the data we needed from all platforms to build a complete management system. Subsequently, we provided the first spreadsheets to the central office and the provincial branches because even suburban entities need reports to check local activity. 

“Currently,” he continues, “50 people use the system. The application is accessible with various user profiles. Provincial branches and offices view the data that pertain to their own sphere of activity, whereas the head offices have a general view. This solution has allowed us to unify databases that before were scattered between headquarters and the Monte dei Paschi di Siena mainframe.”

The main benefit is the ability to continuously monitor all corporate activities. The software makes it possible to view the data, create summaries and charts, and supply the various users with analytical and summary reports that can help with their work. 

“Through the use of the business intelligence system applied to collections, SERIT SICILIA has obtained substantial financial results,” states the general manager, Antonio Finanze. “On average, collections increased 24 percent – that is, €531 million (US$781 million) in comparison to €425 million" the year before. "The optimization of information sources allows us to benefit from complete and up-to-date information and monitor business processes.”
 
Ugo Lombardo, Manager of the Management Control sector, adds, “This application helps us considerably with day-to-day management. In the future, we also plan to implement the OLAP server, which will provide us with greater financial management capacities. We also expect to adopt the SAS Strategic Performance Management solution to monitor dashboards for the company’s progress and be able to input all management system information using the portal.”

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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