New financial system and business unit consolidation

The client organization was comprised of three distinct business units that were originally stand-alone entities. Each business unit maintained its own financial platform. Back office redundancies, as well as financial management and reporting became cumbersome and inefficient. The client looked to consolidate to a single new financial system and chose Sage Intacct.

Blue Mensa was engaged to provide process improvement consulting, program management support, and serve as the primary point of contact between the client and project vendors. The project was broken down into three phases, current state, design (future state), and implementation.

DESIGN PHASE

The design phase required working closely with the client and vendor to develop the future state posture. The project scope was complex and required transitioning the three business units to a new financial platform, as well as the consolidation and standardization of accounting and financial operations. This would also impact many business operational functions and processes. Discovery working sessions were developed to focus on the entire ‘order to cash’ ecosystem. Each session focused on a specific business flows (e.g. AR process) or financial component (e.g. general ledger accounts). Session participants included the client’s subject matter experts (SME) assigned to the specific session subject area and the vendor’s team. During these sessions, SMEs provided the vendor further insight into the organizations operations and the vendor provided an overview of capabilities, best practices and similar client type examples of how Intacct functions for the given session’s subject matter. Blue Mensa worked with both the client and vendor to identify inefficiencies in current processes that could be resolved with the new consolidated platform. The deliverable for each session was a general design document for each specific business flow or financial component.  Individual session design documents were collectively reviewed to validate the flow of the entire ‘order to cash’ process. This was accomplished through multiple iterations.

The result of the design phase was an actionable future state posture. Using the future state plan, Blue Mensa worked with the client and vendor to develop the implementation project scope for the vendor’s statement of work (SOW), as well as internal resource planning, timelines and the project’s budget.

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE | NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM

The implementation phase consisted of several sub-phases; configuration of the Intacct environment, design validation, training, full system testing, data migration, and cutover. The data migration process actually started during the design phase. A significant data scrubbing effort was necessary, since client and vendor information needed to be consolidated from the three legacy financial platforms. A subset of vendor and client information was imported to the Intacct environment that included copies of actual client orders and vendor invoices, from the legacy platforms. This would be used for design validation and training. The design validation and training schedule generally followed the ‘order to cash’ process. The first training class conducted was on order entry and processing using real customer and vendor information. This continued through the complete order to cash process through AR and AP. As team members were trained in their respective area, they were able to fully test the new platform as outlined in the future state plan.

Errors, issues and requests were reported back and addressed. Once training was complete and design validated, the system was fully tested from beginning to end, once again, using actual client and vendor information. Data migration activities paralleled these efforts. Format standards for client and vendor records were defined, as well as cut off criteria,  based on the last transaction date. If no transactions occurred with the client or vendor within three years, information was not migrated to Intacct and archived in the former legacy system. Prior to data migration, all client and vendor information used for testing was deleted from the Intacct environment. The cutover and go-live date was scheduled. During cutover, final data migration occurred during non-production hours. A project support desk was setup to quickly identify and escalate issues to proper resources (internal client team or vendor). Most post cutover issues were processing delays but no outages or system failures. Post-cutover support transitioned to standard support operations within three weeks.

• Implementation sub-phases; Configuration, Design Validation, Training, Full System Testing, Data Migration and Cutover
• A copy of live client and vendor data was used for design validation and testing
• Design validation and training scheduled followed the ‘order to cash’ process, similar to the working session process in the design phase
• Full system testing occurred after design validation and training process was complete

The client accomplished its objectives and consolidated to a single modern cloud-based financial platform. The new platform’s features and functionalities improved daily operational efficiencies. Its dimensional capabilities also provided superior analytical and reporting features not possible with the monolithic legacy systems. The client was able to run each business unit with a high level of autonomy, which included individual processing and financial reporting capabilities, but also provide top-level (single organizational) financial analytics and reporting.

The primary project challenge was related to data migration and developing common standards for client and vendor account information. The client’s three business units provided different services to many of the same clients and used the services of many of the same vendors. Client account information, such as ‘ship to’, ‘bill to’, and ‘worksite’ formats varied between the business units. There were similar issues with vendor account formats. This was complicated by other systems that fed into these legacy financial systems, primarily CRM and field service management platforms. It wasn’t a question that one or more of these other platforms would require program changes. The challenge was determining which system(s) would be the ideal candidate. A new financial system solution was developed by changing the account format in one of the business unit’s field service management platforms and adding a two additional fields to the account screen in Intacct.