ERP Implementation Assessment

The Challenge

A government regulatory agency was aiming to modernize and integrate their financial systems and manual processes into a single corporate financial, planning and reporting system. Existing end-to-end processes designed for their legacy systems were insufficient in providing management with timely and informed reporting to drive effective decision-making and risk management in a continuously evolving financial landscape.

The agency was challenged in identifying business requirements for potential technology solutions as existing manual processes lacked consistency, documentation and further complicated by having to satisfy the needs of multiple core business functions and interfaces with external parties.

The agency needed to:

1. Understand and standardize its back-office processes ahead of its enterprise system implementation
2. Design operational dashboards to optimize reporting capabilities for improving decision-making and risk management

The Approach

CRG conducted an end-to-end diagnostic review of core processes using a LEAN methodology, engaging all core business functions (incl. finance, legal, procurement)

• Facilitated ‘Kaizen’ workshops to understand current state roles, responsibilities and processes and identify material areas of opportunities and process control gaps
• Collected and validated process and business requirements to address current state data and reporting gaps to ensure alignment to future state design and operational reporting
• Re-designed processes to improve standardization, reduce redundancies, institute process controls and ensure data availability for reporting
• Developed requirements-driven KPIs and designed an organization-wide financial dashboard to improve visibility into high-priority financial metrics used for decision-making and risk management
• Created and instituted a repeatable monthly calendar of key financial processes and reports to secure resources and critical reporting periods
• Developed and executed an implementation plan that included knowledge transfer, development of future state process documentation (i.e., maps, RACI, procedures, control plan), a continuous improvement framework and conducted training sessions

The Outcome

• Significantly improved alignment across functional units to reduce total effort, improve cycle time and positively impact overall service delivery by improving and communicating processes, as well as defining branch/individual responsibilities
• Effectively incorporated process controls and a continuous improvement framework to reduce error-rate, improve accuracy and sustain improvements
• Leveraged streamlined future state process maps to inform system selection and procurement
• Designed, implemented and drove change management for successful adoption of organization-wide financial dashboards that improved speed and quality of decision making