Aligning People, Process, and Technology
To see how these concepts played out in our project for this client, please visit Improving Data Integrity and Management Analysis by Integrating Systems.
We see this story play out consistently in our client projects – solid People have to manually Process key items because their company's Technology is outdated, poorly integrated, or incorrectly implemented. If you apply our mantra – Business Results come from a strong alignment of People, Process, and Technology – you can easily guess our client's initial situation:
-
Management lacked confidence in data, and never fully trusted it in making business decisions. A string of business system conversions had frustrated users and yielded occasional inexplicable processing results.
-
Accountants spent a significant part of a month looking backwards, to close the books related to premiums and claims, and then to handle other required statutory and management accounting.
-
Auditors could never test the records as fully and completely as desired, and had issued management letters for several years recommending technology changes to improve matters.
Staying True to the Vision
Indeed, as we got started on this project, our findings only made everyone feel worse – as we dug further and further into the integration work, we better understood the "black box" routines of their business system and exposed many problems never before uncovered. While our client appreciated what we were doing, they sometimes cringed when we brought new issues to light.
Fortunately, our client had the courage to stay true to their vision, and to work with us and their system vendor to see things through. Their new and improved situation is:
-
Management now has strong confidence in data, and can rely on it to make informed decisions. Additionally, management rests easy, knowing we built in data scrubbing routines to check items written by the business system, allowing quick detection and resolution of any issues.
-
Accountants now have automated premiums and claims data in under 2 hours at monthend, and can then move on to other accounting matters. With several business days freed up – each month – for value-added work, their focus has changed from low-value-added bookkeeping to high-value-added management analysis to plan and implement business improvements.
-
Auditors now have all their data requests satisfied, and can finally report a solid improvement in their annual management letter.
Our client's current formula? "Great People + Automated Process + Solid Technology = Much Improved Results."
These improved results are helping our client better manage and ride out a tough business environment. Do you have a similar situation? If so, we can likely help deliver results like these for you.
Todd L. Herman
Get data confidence with our business intelligence services.
