Financial Benchmarking

"So, for us, it has helped sharpen internal contribution accounting, financial performance, and curriculum areas, as well as confirming or challenging us on how much we're spending on certain central services."

[Read Ian's comments in full]

I found that the process and methodology adopted was very robust and the findings clearly communicated at both summary and detailed level. The team were very professional and provided clear and concise insight into the results and the key challenges that were needed to be addressed.

"Ultimately this is a tool designed to do a very specific task and it does it in a very helpful, clear, objective way. What we’ve got with that is some helpful comparison and granularity in terms as to how we’re operating financially as an organisation to support any of those detailed conversations."

[Read Jon's comments in full]

The messages presented by Tribal have increased a collective appreciation of the Group’s position. Having these delivered via an independent and objective voice has helped focus minds on the importance of the information and how this can help shape how we address the significant challenges we are facing. A very distinctive advantage was the how quickly Tribal was able to provide outputs particularly as we had entered into our strategic planning process for 2018-19. Benchmarking is now embedded as part of the College’s ongoing continuous improvement journey and we are hopeful, with Tribal’s help, the next exercise may provide an opportunity for a more collaborative approach within the region to self-evaluation.

To help address the financial challenges facing the College of West Anglia and inform our future strategic direction we undertook a financial benchmarking project with Tribal.

We were aware that we needed to identify areas for savings and, to support this objective, we commissioned an independent analysis of our cost base compared to others in the sector. Tribal’s model provided a robust comparison of activity across the college, helping managers to identify areas for further investigation. Tribal’s modelling also demonstrated the impact of underachievement in 16-19 funding on its financial performance.

The team at Tribal worked closely with managers across the college to understand the data and the complexities of our organisation. As well as detailed discussions of the results with members of the executive team, Tribal presented a clear, concise summary of the key messages to the governing body providing them with critical insight needed to inform decision making.

The Tribal benchmarking exercise has provided us with a useful analysis of our institution which will be invaluable for future planning. We are grateful to our Tribal consultants for their support and feedback throughout the process. The support, advice, follow up meetings, and care taken in reporting to our various stakeholder groups was excellent. Our institutional structure differs to the standard model used by Tribal and this led to queries from colleagues once the analysis had been received. We were very impressed with the way in which Tribal dealt with these questions, and the time and care taken in helping us to understand the detail of the benchmarking analysis

"We’ve got to that stage in our post-merger recovery where we are now looking really closely at how we get that final 20% of efficiency that will take us into a more comfortable financial position. And we know (Benchmarking) can tell us which of our departments are more or less efficient, and what the underlying reasons are behind any lack of efficiency in our delivery."

[Listen to Stewart's comments in full]