Background: To improve its financial reporting process, this multi-national financial institution wanted to reduce its month-end accounting close process from 10 days to 5 days.

CTS Impact Solution:

In order to identify and implement process improvements to reduce this client’s month-end close process, the CTS Impact team interviewed and observed current processes across the entire accounting function.  As a result, over 50 opportunities for process improvement were identified including:

• Quick hits/short-term improvements
  • Create a standard month-end close checklist
  • Reduce number of allocations
  • Develop recurring journal entries
  • Expedite accrual entries through use of budget data
  • Earlier cut-off of accounts payable
  • Revise employee expense reimbursement policy

• Mid and long-term improvements
  • Chart of accounts clean-up
  • Automate account reconciliation and analysis using BlackLine
  • Develop a standard quarterly management reporting package
  • Document standard operating procedures
  • Upgrade financial system to take advantage of auto-workflow functionality (Lawson)

Immediately after the implementation of the quick hits process improvements, the client’s month-end close process was reduced to 7 days.   With the implementation of the long-term improvements, the client’s close process cycle time will be reduced by at least 50%.

Background: Due to rapid growth, this publicly-traded healthcare services company needed to identify more streamlined business processes for its Accounts Payable function in order to gain efficiencies to be scaleable in support of future growth, and to enhance its internal control environment.
In addition, the Accounts Payable department was experiencing very high-turnover, and did not have documentation of standard procedures to conduct cross-training and support of newly-hired staff.

CTS Impact Solution:

The CTS Impact team worked side-by-side with this client’s Accounts Payable team to identify and implement process improvements to its current processes.

As a starting point, CTS Impact staff performed day-to-day tasks of the accounts payable function, enabling them to identify and implement process improvements and system automation opportunities on a real-time basis.  This approach also helped ensure the client did not fall behind on its vendor payments, while it searched and hired for new permanent staff.

Using best practices as a benchmark, CTS Impact also benchmarked the client’s current processes compared to peer organizations to determine key operating metrics, target operating model and service levels.

Through its targeted review across all facets of the Accounts Payable process, CTS Impact implemented numerous process improvements including:

• Elimination of AP backlog
• Automation of invoice-coding in accounting system (Lawson)
• Expanded use of EDI
• New expense reimbursement policy
• Documented standard operating procedures, including PHI considerations for HIPAA compliance
• Implemented new cloud-based tool to prepare 1099’s

Background: In order to manage the large volume of user requests across all corporate administrative functions (e.g. finance, legal, human resources, marketing, etc.), reporting and analysis tools were needed to define user requirements, estimate resource requirements and allocations, estimate level of effort, prioritize concurrent and potentially conflicting activities and analyze the business case to evaluate the return on investment for new projects.

CTS Impact Solution: Using industry best practices, CTS performed the following:

• Project management
  • Develop and prepare project plans
  • Status reporting and updates to Steering Committee
• Program design and development
  • Design standard tools and templates
  • Develop prioritization model to evaluate organizational impact and level of effort
  • Formalized communications plan for frequent updates to user-community
  • Deployment of request management tracking tool (Primavera) to manage in-flight projects
• Conduct pilot
  • Meet with business owners to define requirements
  • Develop business cases to analyze ROI
  • Prepare project charters and projet plans
  • Liaison to IT and business community
• Program roll-out and on-going support
  • Train new Business Analysts on usage of standard processes and tools
  • Provide Interim Business Analysts to preform day-to-day activities

Background: As part of its new services to provide third-party accounting services to its clients, this Germany-based renewable energy company engaged CTS to develop planning and implementation tools to support the on-boarding and transition of their new clients to a standard accounting platform (SAP).

CTS Impact Solution:  The CTS Impact Project Manager provided deep experience to develop a standard transition plan as follows:

• Develop PMO tools
  • Standard project plan for Transition Services
  • Estimation model for proposal process
  • Resource/workload allocation model for accounting organization
  • Define key metrics and service levels

Once these standard planning tools and templates were in place, CTS Impact utilized these tools and provided a Transition team to manage the migration and integration of these new services into the client’s existing accounting function, and to provide interim accounting assistance during the transition as follows:

• Mapping of chart of accounts
• Data conversion and validation
• Interim accounting operations during transition
• Interim financial reporting (IFRS)
• Cross-training to internal staff
• Document standard operating procedures

Background: Due to the extensive number of concurrent projects underway within the Finance function of this Fortune 500 multi-national manufacturer, this client needed to launch and support a PMO to manage progress, and to provide an efficient way for status reporting and resource allocation across competing priorities.

CTS Impact Solution: To support this client through the launch and on–going management of the PMO, CTS Impact provided strong project management expertise to perform the following:

• Develop PMO tools and templates
• Standard project charter
• Standard tool to analyze business case and project ROI
• Workload/resource allocation and prioritization model
• Standard project planning templates
• System and user testing
• Standard status reporting (for management, executives, steering committee, etc.)
• Post–implementation review analysis tool (budget, deliverables, etc.)
• Hands – on project management (CTS Impact staff)
• PMO Lead – pilot and implement tools
• Project Managers – assigned to specific client projects

 

Background: The international operations of this Fortune 500 CTS Impact client did not have standard processes or systems across its 13 production facilities, which limited transparency and consistency of data available to the corporate management team.

CTS Impact Solution: With extensive work experience in foreign operations (along with foreign language proficiency), the CTS Impact Project Manager leveraged his significant financial and supply chain industry expertise to lead efforts as follows:

• Workflow analysis
• On-site data-gathering at 13 foreign plant facilities
  • China (Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen)
  • Europe (UK, Poland)
  • Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Mexico)
• Facilitate joint-design work sessions to define future state requirements
• Gap analysis  to design future state processes
• Develop and document standard operating procedures
• Develop web-based reporting tools to map to Hyperion

Background: As a rapidly growing wireless telecommunications company, the current production planning and scheduling processes were not scalable to meet this CTS Impact client’s future business requirements.

CTS Impact Solution:

• Identify business requirements
• Develop a net purchasing requirements (NPR) model and related tools
• Document standard operating procedures
• Design reports in tandem with new MRP system (SAGE)
• Cross-training of staff

With the rapid expansion of this investment management firm into new lines of business including investment banking and insurance, reporting requirements grew in both size and complexity.  To address its future reporting needs, the current financial system (Great Plains) needed to be replaced.

In addition, due to the complexity of its legal entity structure, including numerous joint ventures and minority-interest entities, along with foreign exchange transactions, an automated reporting tool was needed to consolidate financial results and report on them more efficiently.

As the Business Project Lead, CTS Impact provided a financial services industry-experienced Project Manager with significant capital markets background to assist with documentation of current processes in order to capture current state and to define future business requirements to support the software selection.

Once the new cloud-based software application was selected (Workday Financials and Workday HCM), CTS Impact supported the full life-cycle implementation of this tool, including re-design of the Chart of Accounts and other business processes, documentation of internal controls, user-acceptance (UAT) & systems testing, and end-user training, as well as post go-live support.

Concurrently, the CTS team assisted the management reporting team with its migration to Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) reporting tool and an Essbase business intelligence tool.  Significant data clean-up was performed to facilitate data conversion, along with documentation of standard operating procedures.  The financial system project design to go-live was completed ahead of schedule and under-budget due to the efficiency of experienced CTS Impact team, in collaboration with the internal staff.

In a parallel workstream, CTS Impact also provided hands-on report design expertise to automate short-term reporting processes until the new, long-term solutions were placed into production.

Other CTS Impact Services Provided:

• Asset Management – Investment Operations
  • Back-office optimization
  • Develop and document standard operating procedures
  • Interim staffing
• Internal Controls – Project management
  • SOC-1 readiness and reporting (and SAS 70 previously)
    • Perform risk assessment
    • Documentation of key controls
    • Perform testing
    • Liaison to external auditors

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.

Background: With the concurrent upgrade of its human resources, financials and supply chain ERP system (PeopleSoft), CTS Impact provided operational expertise in finance & accounting, supply chain and HR with specific PeopleSoft implementation and user experience throughout the entire life-cycle of the upgrade to perform the following:

CTS Impact Solution: Using PMI-based project management methodologies, CTS performed:

• Business process analysis
• Workflow design and documentation
• Data mapping
• Data conversion and clean-up
• UAT and system testing
• User-training and roll-out support
• Design reporting tools (reports and queries)