Queensland Rugby League invests in new enterprise software solution from TechnologyOne

Queensland Rugby League has invested in a new enterprise software solution from TechnologyOne – one of Australia’s leading enterprise software companies and a home-grown Queensland business. 

With Sydney and Melbourne in lockdown, the NRL finals this month are being played in Queensland for the first time - capping off a season of scheduling and re-scheduling hundreds of professional and community teams, officials and facilities due to COVID restrictions. It’s been a Tetris-like like puzzle that would have been all the more difficult had Queensland Rugby League (QRL) not integrated 35 cost centres and moves to SaaS beforehand.

QRL - a $35 million a year business employing 90 people - is responsible for the administration and development of the game throughout the State, from the Maroons State of Origin teams through to grassroots football clubs in the Torres Strait.  

QRL says its team behind the scenes has upped its game as a result of their new technology, developing better financial speed, agility and accuracy and in turn improving the organisation’s long term financial profitability and sustainability.  

An internal push to modernise its operations and improve efficiency and accountability meant QRL needed better back-end technology systems. After realising it had outgrown its existing finance, HR and payroll software it went to market in mid-2018 looking for a replacement.

QRL Chief Financial Officer, Graham Maher notes “we partner with some of the best-known brands in the world, organisations like Shell, BHP, Lion and PUMA, but our processes were letting us down. There was a lot of manual, paper-based activities and duplication. Our speed of decision-making was not where it needed to be.

 “We have something like 35 cost centres across the State. We wanted a platform that would give those budget holders ownership so they could make decisions about program delivery without having to come to a member of the Senior Leadership Team or the Finance team.”

After requesting proposals and assessing the tenders, QRL selected TechnologyOne’s Australian Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) solution, OneCorporate. The new systems went live in April 2019 with the team already witnessing a wide variety of benefits.

Maher says financial reporting is now more meaningful and accessible across QRL, leading to better decision-making and fewer bottlenecks across the organisation.

Maher added “we’ve been able to do some unique things: like measuring the cost of a particular game in a particular round, through the program ledger functionality within TechnologyOne. We can see what it costs to move a particular team around the state at any given point in time.

“If you’re putting together a draw and you want to move a team from Cairns to Rockhampton, or Brisbane to PNG—and it costs 25% more to do it in one month compared to another—visibility of those costs adds flexibility to decision-making.

“Rather than wait for finance to give them the numbers, interrogate them and propose options for decision — budget owners come to us now with solutions around funding and program delivery. They’ve already done the work to identify savings and potentially repurpose them to other delivery programs.

“Across the whole of the organisation we now know what our financial commitments look like, and what our forecast looks like. Externally, it’s also given QRL suppliers confidence in getting paid on time, every time.”

Being able to configure the system to meet QRL’s specific requirements has also been beneficial.

TechnologyOne Chief Executive, Ed Chung said the benefits of an integrated SaaS solution is the secret weapon behind many great teams and advises “having clever technology in place makes good sense. It’s given the QRL team time back to do other things that are more valuable to the business, as opposed to just turning a handle on historical operations. Those intangible benefits are often underestimated beforehand.

“We’ve helped hundreds of organisations around Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom make the move to SaaS. Once they make the move, the most common question they asked is ‘why didn’t we do this sooner?’”

For more information on TechnologyOne go to TechnologyOneCorp.com   

Image: Queensland Country Bank Stadium courtesy of Blair Hughes.