With the economy being hit by a global recession, the client required greater levels of accountability and control over its business expenses.

Outcome

In order to facilitate accurate and consistent reporting, many of the client’s financial systems in each region were modified to consistently record transactions with all the required data points. A data warehouse with a custom developed reporting tool was built to consolidate the actual and budget data from the various sources systems and produce the management reports

Business Case

With the economy being hit by a global recession, the client required greater levels of accountability and control over its business expenses.

Solution

In order to facilitate accurate and consistent reporting, many of the client's financial systems in each region were modified to consistently record transactions with all the required data points. A key challenge to overcome was dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the statutory requirements and functionality within each global region's systems in order to establish one version of the truth.

The global reach of the operations necessitated enhanced expense allocation and global budgeting systems to be developed as part of the final solution. This enabled all business units globally to accurately budget and reforecast, and correctly allocate business revenue and expenses.

A data warehouse with a custom developed reporting tool was built to consolidate the actual and budget data from the various sources systems and produce the management reports. These management reports are used by regional, business unit heads and budget owners to monitor costs spent in their areas of responsibility.

The customizations to MRI included entry form, report and database enhancements which enabled the system to differentiate between physical check and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payment methods. The windows component performs payment batch validation and processing and generates an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) file containing all the data required to effect payments from the client’s relevant disbursing accounts. The file is transmitted securely to the bank’s File Transfer Protocol (FTP) endpoint.

Project

The project lifecycle took a multi-phased approach starting with the analysis, design and implementation of the enhancement of the source financial systems, closely followed by the development of the data warehouse environment and its integration with the newly built allocation and global budgeting systems. It also included the management of the scope, implementation and supporting of the new applications.

A major challenge of the project was managing the exceptionally tight and fixed timelines (less than 10 months) as it was critical that all transactions were recorded in a sufficient level of detail from the start of the new financial year. Coupled with this was the challenge of integrating financial systems on different technology platforms. This required effective coordination between multiple project and client teams to implement all the changes simultaneously.

• Man-days = 3700 days
• Duration = 9 calendar months

The project's various system enhancements were implemented into production successfully following user acceptance testing. Monthly management reports continue to be delivered to users globally today.

Benefits

TThe results of the project continue to facilitate enhanced budgeting and reporting capabilities of the client, giving the management team access to a more accurate and consistent view of their profitability across all business lines and regions.

The custom nature of the solution has also given the client flexibility to rollout company-wide business process changes facilitated by the applications' functionality.

Technologies

• SQL Server Integration Services

Regions

• United States
• Europe (incl. United Kingdom, Germany, France & Luxembourg)
• China
• Brazil
• Turkey