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Project Resourcing
Over the past 10 years, SystemsAccountants has refined a resourcing model which has enabled our clients to leverage best value and best practice on multi-sourced and complex finance transformation programmes.
Our key area of expertise is in the following areas of the CFO Agenda:
- Finance/Business Process & Systems (ERP / BPM) Standardisation
- Implementation & Extension of Shared Services
- BPO - Finance & Accounting Outsourcing - incorporating near/off-shoring
These areas are predicted to remain in double digit growth until 2011 (Everest Research 2006) as offshore labour arbitrage, standardised processes, and the consolidation of costly ERP applications continue to drive significant investments as companies use these strategies to wring out costs, improve analytics and gain market share. Our unique resourcing service combines the supply of interim trusted advisory specialists to provide strategic and programme/change management services specific to world class finance at the executive level; with contractor managed services, supplying implementation and delivery teams - high quality resources cherry picked by the client and under their control.
Where do we supply resource?
1. Client side resource
Client staff are one of the most important constituents on a finance change or technology project. However because professionals who thrive in project environments tend to get bored when it's business-as-usual they are typically fairly itinerant and unfortunately clients often can't retain such resource.
There is frequently therefore a need for contractor resource to bolster client teams in areas such as programme management, process design, change management, business integration, knowledge transfer and implementation.
2. Reducing consulting cost
We recognise the important role consultancies and systems integrators play and understand the drivers for engaging consultancies to deliver services with the benefit of warranties. We are also mindful that these firms can leverage experience and intellectual capital from previous projects.
However clients are now more sensitive to the downfalls of handing complete responsibility over to such organisations and recognise that there are considerable safeguards and cost savings to be achieved from the use of tactical deployments of interim consultants & contractors to balance a consulting partner's influence throughout the project lifecycle. As contractors are client-side, they can maintain a check on consulting partners' outputs and ensure business objectives remain in scope.
Often the appointment of contractor teams into the PMO, training function or indeed the configuration workstream will not impact on consultancy warranties and if an Interim Programme Manager has been engaged to shape consultancy engagements at the outset; scope and accountability can be defined to best suit a client's particular circumstance. This offers the ability to obtain highly qualified independent specialists at a significantly reduced rate than the cost of consultancy.
Proposition
Our service enables clients to engage with one recruitment partner to deliver either workstreams of resource or more tactical deployments in areas such as QA and vendor management.
This is accomplished via the use of a proven SLA framework, the components of which have been refined over a 10 year period of delivering resourcing solutions to finance change & ERP programmes. One Supplier Agreement governing contractor supply and quality assurance; providing for strict adherence to 2-way service levels in respect to resource selection & provision geared to accelerate contractor supply in a project environment as opposed to business-as-usual.
We have accumulated a comprehensive understanding of finance transformation and business systems implementation programmes specifically in respect to project roles and responsibilities and when particular types of resource will be required throughout the lifecycle of the programme.
We are sensitive to the significant investment such programmes require and recognise any blockage to the supply of resource can trigger expensive delays. As such our service levels are designed to accelerate effective resource provision in a project environment as opposed to business-as-usual functions.
Other benefits include:
- Team Value Proposition - Our contractors are engaged and provided to site as a SystemsAccountants team. Acting as a Project Partner we introduce measures (deployed on and offsite) to ensure the team gels and thus delivers more value to our clients through the pooling of ideas and experiences.
- Team Retention - Contractor retention is assured through the conduct of non disruptive individual onsite contractor reviews. Our account team will continually assess each contractor's personal situation, seeking to resolve external issues to avoid disruption.
- Back Office Efficiency - Our administrative processes are geared to support projects. We have developed a sophisticated web based timesheet & authorisation system, which enables disparately located contractors to complete work records and for these to be signed off by clients over a secure web portal. The system facilitates self-service client management reporting, which can be used by the PMO as a tool to audit contractor utilisation.
- Market Intelligence - Ongoing market intelligence is provided to the Client throughout the full lifecycle of the project in respect to market rates, skill set availability (locally and offshore), market events that may affect rates and availability and guidance in regards to rate reviews (up or down) that may be necessitated to ensure contractor retention, or to take advantage of market depressions to gain further cost savings where appropriate.
SystemsAccountants has delivered over £20 million of services under this model since 2002, to organizations including; Emap plc, Orange Business Services, Telekom Polska, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, AXA and Serco Group plc.
