Financial System Selection

The Challenge

One of the largest advertising agencies in the world was utilizing disparate financial management processes, tools, and systems across multiple agency brands and offices. The agency had grown over the years through acquisition and had not undertaken an effort to standardize processes across brands. Some agency offices followed processes based on historic client demands. Others used “homegrown” processes to complement their outdated systems. The agency also used different systems to handle various components of financial management. Time consuming manual intervention was commonplace at the agency office level, and often complicated financial reporting and reconciliation at the corporate headquarters level.

The agency desired to implement an integrated enterprise-wide financial management and reporting system. The agency intends to leverage the new system to manage its front-end production cost tracking and back-end financial management processes. The new system would handle traditional job cost tracking functions (i.e., job number creation, job start notification, call reporting, estimates, purchase orders, job closure, reporting, and other key job tracking activities), as well as traditional financial processes (i.e., receivables, payables, and general ledger reporting). The agency also sought to reengineer and standardize its financial management processes to support the system implementation.

The Solution

Intellilink undertook a multi-pronged approach in order to address the agency’s challenges, and to maximize the benefit of the new system.

Process Analysis & Functional Requirements Gathering - Intellilink organized a multi-disciplined team led by the agency Controller and the Director of Global Information Technology. The team included Finance and Client Accounting directors from multiple agency offices. Intellilink conducted financial process workshops and one-on one interviews to document as-is processes and identify improvement opportunities. Intellilink used findings from the process workshops and its subject matter expertise to develop functional requirements for the proposed system. The objective was to gather functional requirements that captured the needs of all parties involved in financial management.

RFP Development - The team researched vendors whose solutions could handle advertising specific processes as well as standard financial management activities. Intellilink investigated a host of vendors including small industry players, mid-range providers, and large ERP vendors. Intellilink prepared a Request for Proposal which included a qualitative evaluation, functional requirements matrix, and cost evaluation.

Short List Selection - Intellilink issued the RFP to six vendors; three ERP solutions, and three niche project management and project accounting focused vendors. Using the responses to the RFP and follow up discussions with each of the vendors, the team selected three vendors to continue into the detailed functional and technical evaluation phase.

Functional Evaluation - Intellilink developed detailed demonstration scripts (use cases) based on agency processes. To enable rigorous comparison of the vendors, each vendor was supplied with sample data to be used when executing the scripts. Additionally, the vendors conducted several walkthroughs with the team to ensure that they fully understood the scripts and the expected results for each business scenario. The vendors then configured their package in order to demonstrate their fit with the business processes. In some cases, vendors developed a customized solution as the product as delivered could not fully meet the requirements. Vendors then presented their solution to a cross-functional team representing each of the key offices. The vendors were rated from a functional perspective based on how well they met the desired business process.

Technical Evaluation - Due diligence was then conducted from a technical perspective. These criteria included the ability to integrate with the client’s existing systems, technology platform, performance & scalability, security, configuration & customization, technical skills required to support the application, and ease of maintenance & upgrades.

Final Recommendation - The final recommendation was developed using the results of the functional & technical evaluation. In addition, the vendor’s financial stability, results from customer reference calls & site visits, intended product roadmap & investment plans and fit with the organization was taken into consideration.