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Case Studies
MOSS 2007 Financial Reporting Solution Promotes Efficiency
Project at a Glance |
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RDA developed a reporting solution for a student lending organization that allows analysts to spend more time reviewing and analyzing content and less time creating it, This solution also improves the management of the review process, enabling individuals to be assigned tasks and managed to deadlines. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is the nation's leading provider of student loans and administrator of college savings plans. The company primarily provides federal and private student loans, including consolidation loans, for undergraduate and graduate students and their parents. In addition, they offer comprehensive information and resources to assist students, parents, and guidance professionals with the financial aid process. The company owns or manages student loans for nearly 10 million customers, administers more than $11 billion in college savings accounts for one million customers through its subsidiary and employs approximately 12,000 individuals at offices nationwide.
Background
Our client wanted to improve the process by which the Quarterly and Annual Public Financial Reports (Earnings Release, 10Q and 10K) are prepared. This was part of a broader initiative to reduce the amount of time for closing the books and being able to publish the company's results.
Previously, our client relied on a manual process with extensive clerical work to create and review the Earnings Release, 10K and 10Q reports. The process involved collaboration between numerous people both inside and outside the organization. Because of tight deadlines, the process often required a number of key individuals to work long hours and perform extensive clerical activities. In addition, the number of individuals involved in the process, combined with the tight timeframe, necessitated intense coordination and management of the process to ensure that tasks were completed on time.
An automated process would reduce the time and effort necessary to complete the company's financial earnings and allow trained financial analysts to devote proportionately more time to reviewing the content of reports. At the same time, the entire process could be orchestrated more effectively. Ultimately, automation would result in less time and effort required to compile the reports.
Solution Detail
The Process
Creating a public financial report, such as a 10K or 10Q, is a highly complex process, requiring approximately 200 people
distributed throughout the financial organization to compile, review and sign off on a single Word document. This process is
managed via email by a central group, Corporate Financial Reporting (CFR). Prior to the implementation of this solution they
relied on email to coordinate the process. This caused numerous compilation and versioning challenges. RDA built a solution to
surmount these challenges using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office as the foundation.
To achieve this, RDA created custom site templates, lists, Web parts, and workflows to implement and expedite the company's business financial reporting process. For each quarter, the CFR department creates a new workspace which is automatically populated with information about the process. Information created within a new financial reporting site includes the templates for the new report and historical process information for how the process was executed previously. This historical information includes how the documents should be divided up and distributed and a record of all the reviewers who were involved in the process from the previous quarter. This reduces the time and effort required by the CFR group to initiate the public reporting process. In addition, it persists domain knowledge about the process inside the solution rather than through the individual workers.
Once the new site has been created, the single financial reporting document is programmatically decomposed into several subdocuments. Each of these new documents is assigned an owner within the company's Financial Reporting organization. The CFR group then initiates a custom workflow that tasks these users to update their sections of the document. This dramatically changes the way the document is worked on by distributing the compilation of information outside the CFR group, increasing the number of people who can work on the document from several to several dozen. It also reduces the clerical work done by the CFR group and returns them to being domain knowledge experts. Finally, it moves ownership for sections of the document from the CFR group to the individuals who are creating the content and who can now directly insert text and data into the document. Finally, workflow status information is populated on the site, allowing any user at any time to view an update of where they are in the process. This is a dramatic shift, allowing easy access to information about the status of the process without having to contact and distract the CFR group.
The process now moves into the second phase, reviewing and approving. For a single financial report there may be 30 or more reviews, each containing nearly 100 reviewers in a 20-day period. Under the old system, which relied on email, the CFR group crafted emails with the document attached. At times, three or more document versions were sent out in the same day. This put a large burden on the CFR group. In addition, there was no guarantee that the reviewer always had the most current version of the document. They would start to review the first version they came across in their email even though this could have been hours or days old, which caused serious confusion among the reviewers. This has been migrated to a workflow that can be launched at the push of a button. The workflow creates a task and email for every reviewer containing a link to the current version of the document on the portal. Now a reviewer can be sure that they are looking at the most recent version no matter which email link they click from and their actions are tracked using Microsoft Office's Track Changes feature. Finally, the overall status of approval can be recorded, tracked and displayed so everyone knows the exact process for each review.
Through this solution, RDA has helped our client create their public financial reports more efficiently and with better insight into the process.
Unique Aspects of Solution
This solution is unique in that it created a customized human workflow business solution using tools (such as Microsoft Office)
that were already familiar to our client's user community. To accomplish this, RDA leveraged the built-in capabilities within MOSS
and Office and then expanded these with custom code. Based on discussions with our client, it become clear that the solution
needed to retain as much flexibility and control in the hands of the business process owners as possible while still complying
with all corporate IT policies.
This led RDA to build a solution that allowed the business process owners to change portions of the solution as their business needs changed. They needed to be able to make the changes without the aid of a developer. This led to the creation of a set of Web parts that the business process owners could use to manipulate the decomposition of the document as well as the workflows. RDA delivered a solution that enabled a tracked, repeatable process that could evolve with business needs.
The power of the integration between Microsoft Office and MOSS to handle document versioning and editing reduced the learning curve of our client's employees. In addition, as RDA deployed the custom workflows, the integration between these and Microsoft Office gave users the power to work as they wanted. Those familiar with Office could accomplish all their tasks within that solution alone. However, those that were more comfortable on the Web could use MOSS as the interface to the solution.
Challenges
The company's financial organization came to the conclusion that they could improve their process to create financial reports. This led to an interesting challenge, since this part of the organization is comprised of highly skilled financial professionals who were not necessarily well-versed in the tools and technologies that could be brought to bear to solve their problems. All the members of the organization had strong backgrounds working with Microsoft Office technologies and wanted to leverage that in-house knowledge in their new solution. Together, this company and RDA crafted a solution based on MOSS and Office that would meet their needs. In doing so, several key areas arose where RDA leveraged specific aspects of Microsoft's technology to create an exceptional user experience.
Since the business users were the driving force behind the initiation of this process and they had a vast disparity in technical skill, RDA needed to deliver a solution that gave the end users the ability to work with the solution in numerous ways. Thanks to the integration of the Microsoft Office suite of tools with MOSS, RDA was able to achieve this. One of the two major areas that users were exceptionally happy with was the ability to work with their assigned workflow tasks either inside of MOSS or directly inside of Microsoft Word. Leveraging this flexibility allowed the adoption of the application to proceed more rapidly than otherwise possible. In fact, this integration was so important to the business users that they pushed the IT organization to acquire and roll out Office 2007 on an accelerated timeline.
The other major area that made our customer's overall experience exceptional was how rapidly RDA could deliver functionality. RDA leveraged MOSS's architecture to rapidly build a custom solution that addressed the company's business need. The ability to rapidly create portions of the solution fit perfectly with the tight schedule of our client's CFR team. The end users had very limited windows of availability when they could test and evaluate the solution as it was created. They truly appreciated that fact that they could request a change and have it delivered in a very short time frame.
Overall, the exceptional experiences realized by our customer were due in large part to the maturity and extensibility of the Microsoft Office suite of tools.
Benefits
The benefits of a Public Financial Reporting solution include:- Allows key individuals to spend more time reviewing and analyzing the content and less time creating it.
- Improves the management of the preparation and review process, enabling individuals to be assigned tasks and managed to deadlines.
- Facilitates parallelism and collaboration so that sections of the documents can be assembled concurrently, thereby saving time.
- Provides version control and audit trails so that changes to the documents can be tracked.
- Simplifies transition process. Because the solution is built upon technologies already familiar to users, adaptation to the new solution, including training effort and cost will be negligible.
Technically Speaking
RDA developed a workflow type solution, leveraging Microsoft Office and MOSS 2007, that includes custom workspaces, lists, content types, workflow, and Web parts within SharePoint to handle the creation and review process for the Earnings Release, 10Q and 10K Financial Reports. Several previous financial reports were merged together to create the basis for the new financial report. Using customized workflow, the application allows this client to track the creation, review and approval process.
The solution incorporates numerous features of the Microsoft Office platform, including integration of workflow tasks within Microsoft Word, document comparison and merge features, and styles protection. The custom workflows are utilizing custom Web-based InfoPath forms and the forms server to aid in the routing and administration of workflow tasks.
Client Testimonial
Our client's Managing Director, Financial Systems, wrote:
"Our public filing process for compiling, editing, and reviewing regulatory documents is manually intensive and involves different individuals across many business areas. Reliance on one master document per business process causes numerous problems such as version control, a sea of emails, manual reviews, and participant frustration.
The main objectives of our solution include (1) reduction in overall effort required to produce external regulatory documents, (2) introduce a distributed, consistent, repeatable process for data input, (3) increase focus on document review, (4) report on process efficiency through identified process metrics, and (5) maintain a positive end user experience.
An important aspect of this solution was to deploy familiar tools. Even though SharePoint 2007 is new to our environment, the ability to seamlessly reuse existing Microsoft Word documents greatly assisted user acceptance.
By embedding our public filings process into SharePoint 2007 and breaking down large documents into sections, our company has been able to distribute the workload to the actual 'owners' and they can update their portions directly. In addition, online approvals provide much improved insight to the overall process, and easily allow management to see the latest snapshot of each document through final sign-off."
