OneBeacon Turns to Another for Financials 8.4 Implementation
OneBeacon is a regional property/casualty insurer with personal, commercial, and specialty products and services. Doing business solely through independent brokers, OneBeacon services customers throughout the Northeast with approximately $1.8 billion in direct written premiums annually.
OneBeacon licensed PeopleSoft Financials in June 2003 and in September, after selecting Beacon as its implementation partner, began the implementation of General Ledger, Payables, eProcurement and Expenses. The Deployment of the modules would be staggered with eProcurement and Expenses scheduled for a January 2004 go-live and General Ledger and Expenses for the second quarter.
The Challenge
OneBeacon’s financial systems were an array of older systems resulting from earlier mergers and acquisitions by OneBeacon’s predecessor company. No single system held information to provide a complete picture of OneBeacon’s financial picture, and final reports – both internal and external – were often cobbled together in spreadsheets assembling data from several disparate systems.
In addition to the PeopleSoft implementation, underlying data source systems for premiums and losses were being rewritten, and the elements for interfacing and data integration were often in flux; OneBeacon was implementing a financial data warehouse and designing related data marts, and business processes were being re-worked to address the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. With these various initiatives proceeding concurrently with normal day-to-day operations, user resources would be a challenge. The Financials implementation, which would include a chart of accounts redesign and several years of history conversion, would need to be coordinated and integrated with these other initiatives.
Finally, the PeopleSoft infrastructure was new to OneBeacon, and the IT area would need to come up to speed quickly to provide a stable environment for the initial modules going live in January 2004.
The PeopleSoft – Beacon Solution
OneBeacon IT area needed an experienced partner to help transfer knowledge of the new technologies by guiding its staff through configuration, security, workflow setup, and tools use as it built out the new infrastructure, completed setup and migration of various environments, developed interfaces and conversions, and supported user processing. The user areas needed to review and update their work practices to take advantage of the new system opportunities. With a small team of experienced consultants from Beacon Application Services, the project commenced in September 2003 and the modules went live, on time and within budget, in the first half of 2004.
Beacon led the chart of accounts redesign effort, taking into account the needs of management reporting to measure financial performance against budget in order to capitalize on OneBeacon’s ability to respond quickly to changes within its regional marketplaces. The design also considered external reporting requirements to facilitate reporting on a cash, GAAP and statutory basis. The team had to coordinate with the data warehouse initiative to identify reconciliation points and the appropriate level of detail to be stored, the warehouse, and PeopleSoft in support of their control, analytical and reporting objectives. Due to resource constraints, once the chart of accounts was designed and reports inventoried, Beacon took the lead developing all the required general ledger reports.
Working closely with key users and process owners of each PeopleSoft module, Beacon led a review and redesign of business processes to eliminate manual processes and automate reconciliation processes and controls, while coordinating with the company wide business processing re-engineering effort, ever cognizant of control points and audit reporting to support systems reliability requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Beacon led the effort to configure and set up the modules to support the redesigned processes and to provide for several other business objectives, including: consolidation and sub-consolidation processing and reporting on multiple bases; workflow automation to enable automated routing, storage, and retrieval of key documents; and improvements in vendor management and reporting and realizing disbursement efficiencies. Beacon coordinated closely with internal training staff, QA teams, and audit staff in the development and execution of system, user acceptance and performance testing, training, and systems deployment.
Benefits
In addition to new financial systems, OneBeacon now has a redesigned chart of accounts that not only meets its needs but those of its parent company as well. Purchasing functions that were processed manually in the past are now done in PeopleSoft: requisitioning, contracts, items and returns to vendors. Payables controls have been enhanced, and automated interfaces with the bank facilitate payment processing and cash reconciliation. Web-based expense report preparation and processing has facilitated expense submission and reimbursement for frequent travelers. Additionally, workflow was implemented for the approval of requisitions, purchase orders, vouchers, expense reports, and journal entries - streamlining the process and providing greater internal control.
How Beacon Added Value
By working closely with the client and leveraging our technical and functional knowledge of PeopleSoft, best practices and system implementations, Beacon delivered a systems implementation that meets the needs of OneBeacon and maximizes its investment in PeopleSoft. Equally as important, Beacon staff transferred knowledge during technical development and testing, business process reviews, fit/gap analyses, testing, and training sessions designed to instill user confidence, allowing them to better serve the needs of this fast-growing and dynamic company.
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