Case Study – Finance Transformation for Professional Services Firm

Industry: Business Services
Type of Service: Finance Transformation

Issue

Our client, a 100+ professional, multi-office professional services firm was ending its affiliation with an International Firm. As part of the separation, our client was required to migrate off the International Firm’s infrastructure, including their Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) and Billing systems, at a date certain (approximately three months from the time CFOCP was engaged). The client had selected a cloud-based ERP system and several add-in products to form the core of their new accounting infrastructure and had engaged the ERP vendor to assist with the technical aspects of the migration. However, our client realized that they did not have the depth of staff to complete the migration using their Finance resources. They hired CFOCP to manage and execute the migration on a day-to-day basis, driving project planning and execution; ensuring that all tasks were completed on a timely basis and existing Finance resources were used as efficiently as possible.

What We Did

Working with the Controller and two key members of his staff, our activities included:

• Development and management of an overall project plan including status reporting to the CFO
• Diagnosis and documentation of their existing accounting processes
• Understanding exactly how the International Firm’s PeopleSoft based accounting systems worked and how their data was structured
• Designing a new, much more simple process, keeping the key capabilities needed by our client while eliminating the International Firm’s legacy complexity. Among the items addressed was a change from a 52-week fiscal year to a calendar fiscal year.
• Creating and coordinating a master integration plan between ERP system and the three non-ERP satellite systems. While part of the “ERP environment”, each had differing levels of integration with ERP system, from seamless to almost non-existent.
• Writing three Business Requirements documents
• Developing a report and dashboard migration plan
• Developing and executing a data migration plan. This included migration of all key master files; seven years of history in summary form, and four months (fiscal year to date) of every recorded transaction in the old system (approximately 400,000 entries). Reconciled all balances and activity to the penny.
• Development and execution of test cases
• Post migration support and training

Outcome

The implementation was time-bound. The cutover date was 90 days from the time we commenced work. Moreover, the International Firm’s PeopleSoft system was only partially understood by the client. This made the diagnosis and documentation work particularly challenging was well as increasing the degree of difficulty of the data migration effort. Despite these challenges, the migration was successful and by 120 days, the system was fully stabilized and operating efficiently.