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December 20, 2022

Australian Football League optimizes business operations with Dynamics 365 Finance

The Australian Football League (AFL) nationally employs about 700 regular full-time employees, with the industry engaging another 3,000 or more employees in various club, stadium, and community football related roles—who must all coordinate efforts to create each season of sport and spectacle for fans. The 18 clubs operating under its banner are each their own legal entity, some with additional business lines. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, AFL moved its on-premises financial work to the cloud, and in the process, created a new industry platform to reinforce best practices, standardize operations, and take advantage of automation at scale.  

Australian Football League

“We have grown as a business, and the finance team has gone through a transformation not just by putting this system together, but really developing a business partnering model with our clubs, getting in from the start and then letting that information flow through.”

Melissa Azzopardi, General Manager of Finance, Australian Football League

Australian Football League (AFL) clubs have battled every year since 1951 to get their name engraved on The Premiership Cup, awarded to the team who wins the league’s grand final. Achieving that shining moment takes the hard work of players, but also thousands of employees across 18 AFL clubs whose work includes everything from athlete management to team finances.

“The clubs are all independent legal entities and they all run their own financials—my role is to oversee the whole industry balance sheet. We needed standard processes and efficiencies across the industry to facilitate bringing this industry view together,” said Melissa Azzopardi, GM Finance at Australian Football League. Because each club is a legal entity, AFL financial reporting was long decentralized, making standardization unwieldy, and best practices difficult to maintain. With an increasing number of stakeholders operating within more complex business environments, it became clear AFL had outgrown its on-premises financial system.

The AFL team needed a solution employees could access anywhere, one that offered a consistent chart of accounts, and strict governance around spend and revenue. A more automated solution would allow the AFL and Club Finance teams to work more efficiently and empower them to spend more time using data to drive insights, and less time on manual tasks. The AFL team saw an opportunity to offer end-to-end and secure financial systems to every club with a new, cloud-based system.

“We’ve already put the building blocks in. Now we just continue to enhance it and build on it and drive efficiency through.”

Simon Wirth, Head of Technology Planning and Delivery, Australian Football League

An industry-wide solution

Any new solution needed to be compelling for AFL clubs, with an easy onboarding process, and clear business benefits. A simple adoption process would mean more clubs opting in, and more clubs opting in would mean more opportunities for standardization, automation, and sharing best practices. 

Azzopardi knew that the solution would have to be flexible in order to be a viable and attractive option for the whole industry. Clubs of different sizes have different business needs, so the system needed to be a light lift for smaller clubs while still supporting a robust range of business uses. “We needed to have a common chart of accounts,” says Azzopardi, “but still accommodate the different types of business activity that we have across our industry.” 

And it had to be implemented before the previous solution reached the end of its life cycle, giving AFL and its technology partner Fusion5, a member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, just eight months to make the transition. 

“The clubs are all independent legal entities and they all run their own financials—my role is to oversee the whole industry balance sheet. We needed standard processes and efficiencies across the industry to facilitate bringing this industry view together.”

Melissa Azzopardi, GM Finance, Australian Football League

Planning for success

As AFL was already a Microsoft Office 365 customer and planning to migrate services to Azure, Dynamics 365 was an appealing choice. Due to the project’s time constraints, Simon Wirth, Head of Technology Planning and Delivery at Australian Football League says the AFL team had an ambitious goal: “Our mantra going into this was ‘no customization,’ or very little customization.” 

 The out-of-the-box services built into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance could serve as the foundation for a platform that could be spun up quickly and evolve over time. “It’s in the cloud,” says Wirth, “we know it’s highly secure, we know it’s patched regularly. Access provisioning is much easier.” These were all good signs for a team on a timeline. 

 AFL and Fusion5 got hands-on with clubs, providing demos to get buy-in and then providing support throughout implementation. 

The delivery team scoped aggressively for the initial release. “The first release was more than a minimum viable product, because we wanted to make sure it was useable and people loved it,” says Wirth. “But we had to move really quickly, because the older system was at the end of its life,” adds Azzopardi. 

Standardization and security

To start, AFL chose to focus on improving efficiency, optimizing the most time-consuming tasks, and enhanced security. Wirth and Azzopardi knew that security would be crucial for driving adoption. “We do provide a centralized support model for clubs,” says Wirth. “To support it, we need a fair degree of access—but we only have visibility of the data we need.” Dynamics 365 Finance offers robust authorization options, which allow security permission control on a user-by-user basis.  High levels of security and control helped the clubs trust the new platform—which was essential to its success. 

Now, AFL can connect data and processes throughout Dynamics 365 to create a centralized source of intelligence. Twelve clubs have adopted the new system within the first 12 months of operations with more interested in joining over the coming years. Rules-based charts of account have helped further standardize financials for the clubs that opted in.

Immediate results

The clubs using the new platform have seen immediate benefits, especially when it comes to performance. “We had a lot of issues on the old platform, particularly working remotely,” says Wirth. “That’s all gone away.” Two-factor authentication and built-in remote support provide AFL and club employees with the flexibility to get their jobs done collaboratively—whether they’re in the same room or working together around the country. 

Azzopardi’s team has also started reaping the rewards of the migration. In the previous manual system, only about 10 percent of purchase orders came through correctly. Others would be missing information or filed improperly, leading to extra work for the team as it tracked down project numbers and quadruple-checked accounts. Since moving to Dynamics 365 Finance, the team is now seeing nearly 50 percent of purchase orders coming through correctly. Azzopardi is optimistic that that number will keep improving as the AFL learns more about the system and adapts to the new processes.

The new solution has also helped both the individual clubs and the overall AFL finance team become more efficient. End-of-month reports that used to take up to 15 days are now completed in about 10, and Azzopardi is hoping to see that number shrink to just 3 or 4 days soon. “We have grown as a business, and the finance team has gone through a transformation not just by putting this system together, but really developing a business partnering model with our clubs, getting in from the start, and then letting that information flow through,” said Azzopardi.

Pushing toward the goal

AFL moved its on-premises financial work to the cloud, and in the process, created a new platform to reinforce best practices, standardize operations, and take advantage of automation at scale. “We’ve put the building blocks in. Now we just continue to enhance it and build on it and drive efficiency through,” says Wirth. 

 “The next stage is delivery of the road map,” adds Azzopardi. “We want to get the best out of this system, and make sure we’re using the right functionality.” The AFL finance team now has an enhancement backlog where it tracks upcoming changes. Some of the planned enhancements started as requests from the early adopter clubs. Further improvements will be considered and prioritized as appropriate.

 As more clubs adopt the platform, individual clubs and AFL as a whole will continue to prioritize enhancements, refine efficiencies, share best practices, and find even more innovative ways to help the individual clubs thrive and the league grow. The ease, security, and flexibility of Dynamics 365 Finance made it possible to get the majority of clubs onboard within a tight deadline.  Azzopardi says being able to “give the team and clubs the right tools to do what they want and need to do, will support their level of engagement and be a gamechanger.”

Find out more about AFL on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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