NewsVentera Helping Major Financial Concern Streamline Business Operations
Background
Ventera provides wide-ranging IT and professional services support to one of the world's largest financial services firms. Within one of their operating Divisions, three separate business units handle equity investments. Each unit operates independently, which had created a number of operational issues, including non-standard data, which made reporting and management difficult; inconsistent interactions with customers; and limited ability to cross-sell, to increase revenue. During 2004 the Division asked Ventera to look across the enterprise, analyze current business operations in each of the three areas, and prepare recommendations for improvement. Ventera staff worked closely with their managers to develop 40 detailed recommendations. The Division's senior leadership reviewed these and selected several for immediate implementation.
Approach
Today, Ventera is acting on one of the selected recommendations - leading an initiative to centralize all of the Division's equity financial management functions. The three business units currently use a variety of spreadsheets, MS Access databases, user-developed programs, manual processes, even email and voice communications to perform equity financial management. Not only is this inefficient for each business unit, but it precludes any cross-organization data sharing, and is the root cause of the issues noted above.
Stepping off from our previous efforts, Ventera is currently conducting a three-part effort to solve this problem.
Part 1 - Conduct Business Process Redesign. Ventera is conducting a detailed business operations analysis of the financial management activities of the three business units to:
- Extract financial management activities to place into a
centralized organization, and identify opportunities to
migrate currently automated activities (spreadsheets,
local programs) to a new centralized equity management system.
- Identify opportunities to automate manual processes.
- Increase controls over the application of economic
and accounting business rules.
- Eliminate or improve low-value activities.
- Provide more time for the analysis of equity information
within the forecasting cycle.
- Eliminate redundant activities between organizations.
- Standardize data definitions.
Part 2 - Plan For and Manage Organizational Change. A major objective of this effort is to establish a new, centralized financial management organization within the Division that will serve the three operating units. Ventera's business operations analysis, described above, will help to determine:
- How financial activities will be managed and completed by the new organization.
- Staffing positions and responsibilities for the new organization (roles, not individuals).
- How the centralized organization will support the three operating units.
- Business objectives and performance measures for the new organization, and how to report on these.
In addition, Ventera will create a Transition Plan that will define all of the operational steps necessary for the Division to evolve into a new organizational structure. The Transition Plan will address things such as cultural change, and new reporting structures.
Part 3 - Define, Design, and Develop Supporting System(s). In conjunction with defining the new financial management organization, Ventera will define the scope of an automated system to support the organization in place of the various end user computing applications the organization currently utilizes. Since the Division does not currently have any enterprise-wide systems supporting financial management, this is a unique opportunity to design a new system from the ground up.