Background: This large multi-national investment management firm’s financial system was no longer being supported by the software vendor, so it was imperative to migrate to a new financial system quickly to mitigate risk. In addition, its financial reporting requirements had evolved significantly, so they needed to improve their accounting processes.
In addition, this client needed to select and replace a disparate group of HR and payroll systems, to gain efficiencies from a standard platform.
CTS Impact Solution:
In order to assist this client, CTS Impact provided a team with deep industry experience to lead the software selection design, analysis and implementation of a new financial system. To compress the timeline of this complex project, and given the diverse functionality of these systems, the CTS Impact project team had a blend of hands-on experience in HR, payroll and accounting, rather than two independent functional teams.
Software Vendor Analysis
As the first step, CTS Impact worked closely with the process owners to identify business requirements for a new financial system. CTS Impact documented current processes in order to define requirements and to identify future state process improvements and automation opportunities.
Leveraging the CTS Impact toolkit, a targeted RFP was developed to review a cross-section of software vendors including cloud and ERP options (NetSuite, Workday, Dynamics AX and Oracle).
Given the diverse functionality of these systems, CTS Impact helped compress the timeline of the client’s software selection by performing much of the pre-screening and analysis prior to the vendor demos presented to the client.
Pre-Implementation
As soon as the client selected NetSuite, CTS Impact worked with each of the functional areas of accounting and finance to prepare for the implementation, including:
- Chart of accounts re-design
- Data clean-up (vendor master file, historical data)
- Detail process analysis
- Define new delegation of authority and approval levels to support auto-workflow processing of accounts payable and journal entries
- Define system security levels and permissions
- Definition of future state reporting requirements
System Implementation and Process Change Management
As an extension of the client’s staff, CTS assisted throughout the entire implementation with:
- Process design worksessions to define future state processes
- Configuration support as liaison to NetSuite technical team
- Data conversion and validation
- Testing
- Develop user-training documentation with client-specific processes
- Document standard operating procedures (SOPs)
In addition, to gain added efficiency and enhance controls, CTS Impact worked with the client’s Human Resources system, UltiPro, to develop, test and implement a seamless integration between UltiPro Payroll and NetSuite.
Once go-live, CTS Impact provided post go-live support during the initial month-end close process to ensure knowledge system.