Migration to new accounting and operations system

SUMMARY

Avantage Reply assisted a Finance department of a well-known Private Bank in preparations to migrate to a new accounting and operations system. The project covered a wide range of activities such as:

• Detailed cartography of existing processes and procedures and design of s.c TO-BE processes,
• exhaustive inventory of current regulatory, managerial and operational reports and definition of how these reports will be produced with the new system,
• support in business requirements formalization and escalations.

Equally, Avantage Reply ensure PMO role to represent Finance department within the broader migration program engaging various functions of the bank.

CUSTOMER GOALS

The main goal of our client was to ensure that all activities of Finance department - treasury, accounting and regulatory reporting, invoicing and planning and management control – will be fully operational post-migration to the new accounting and operations system.

As the intermediary milestone, the client wanted to formalise its business requirements and to conduct a series of the conclusive User Acceptance Tests (UAT).

CHALLENGES

The key challenges encountered during the project were:

• Limited availability of the internal resources (engaged in production activities) to provide the input for the analysis of process or to perform the UAT,
• limited knowledge and understanding of the new system that would be sufficient to design the TO-BE process from the early stage of the project,
• heavy security limitations due to bank secrecy policies e.g. availability of the new system to production teams based in the Center of Excellence.

SOLUTION

Avantage Reply mobilized senior resources with mixed, business and project management skills, to successfully conduct the preparations for system migration. The key activities performed during the project were:

• Identification of processes and procedures impacted by the change in accounted system,
• design of RACI of the post-migration process,
• inventory of reports produced by all finance functions and definition of a new source of data; this implied the decision on how the report would need to be redone to avoid the regression in reporting activities post-migration
• participation in first UATs, incl. definition of test cases, execution of tests, escalation of identified defects and follow-up of resolutions,
• acting as a point of contact for the finance department in migration program fora and committees, e.g. access and security management,
• orchestration of the Finance operating committee and coordination of the department’s deliverables to the program, incl. tasks executed by the offshored teams.

As a continuation of this project, Avantage Reply has ensured the support to the client until post-migration phase.