|
contents | business | |||||||
| Hitachi Consulting UK Helps the Innovation Group Hitachi Consulting UK is helping the Innovation Group to transform its global claims administrators' business by consolidating legacy financial systems into a new corporate ledger application. The new application will run on a Microsoft Dynamics AX platform and integrate with Innovation Group's latest insurance software, 'Insurer'. Innovation Group operates within a number of regions globally including the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Australia, South Africa and the US. The company handles incidents and claims for more than 800 insurance and finance service customers per year. As a result of substantial growth through acquisition, the company was operating ten disparate financial back-office systems. Innovation Group recognised that operating from multiple financial management systems was causing the business a number of challenges, including the manual tasks of month end processes within each region and the consolidation of global accounts. Following a comprehensive selection process, Innovation Group chose Microsoft Dynamics AX as its platform and awarded the implementation project to Hitachi Consulting UK. One of the deciding factors for Innovation Group was Hitachi Consulting UK's Dynamics AX Delivery methodology, known as 'Consensus', which includes a toolset and accelerators to help reduce risk, delivery times and cost, and facilitate best practice configuration. Hitachi Consulting's consultants completed an initial inception phase. This involved workshops with key stakeholders to validate the assumptions made regarding the adoption of Hitachi Consulting's best practice processes, the use of standard Dynamics AX without any customisations, as well as to understand and scope the integration with Insurer. Hitachi Consulting's library of nearly 1,000 best practice business processes, matching configurations and test scripts help to drive down the long-term cost of ownership and improve the overall supportability of the platform. The project also made use of Hitachi Consulting's offshore development team in Pune, India, whose staff provided excellent support to ensure the project was delivered on time and within budget. The business benefits that are expected to be realised from the roll-out of the Microsoft Dynamics solution include: • Operational savings across finance teams as a result of business process automation; • Significantly reduced licence and upgrade costs; • Improved visibility and management of operational finances and cash flow – the company is now in a better position to improve age debtors and control costs; • A scalable platform for future business growth. The first phase of the project was delivered in December 2009. This involved supporting Innovation Group with the first roll-out of its new finance platform to its business in France. It also involved delivering training and support materials to enable Innovation Group to complete the roll-out across Spain, UK, Germany, Australia, South Africa and the US in 2010. write your comments about the article :: © 2010 Computing News :: home page |