Case Studies

New Application Automates Month-End & Provides Better Business Intelligence

The Client

A large multi-state utility company that engages in the natural gas and electric businesses, including generating, transmitting, distributing and selling electricity; transporting, processing, storing and marketing natural gas; and operating power plants.

What the Client Wanted

The client wanted to be able to provide new financial reporting capabilities to management. To accomplish this, they needed to automate the management of their private lighting business, and make the existing legacy application SOX-compliant. This was achieved by adding new accounting functionality to the application, including automating the collection and maintenance of all account information such as inventory, work orders and maintenance contract data.

Challenges

The client’s current legacy application was unstable with poor data quality. Their month-end close was being done manually with a series of spreadsheets; these spreadsheets “ran the business”. The new application was going to be distributed to approximately 500 end users and needed to have accurate data.

The Solution

LUCRUM delivered an application which automated the client’s month-end close and provided comprehensive financial reporting. They resolved the client’s data integrity issues by cleansing the master data set and addressing controls over data input. SOX-compliance deficiencies were met through the application of strict security policies and audit and logging capabilities for production data.

Development and Implementation

LUCRUM demonstrated ownership of the business problem and solution — something the client had never seen with this particular application. They worked closely with the client from the beginning, creating the charter and requirements documents, presenting them to the Project Steering Committee and using feedback from an expanded project team to identify the final deliverables. The LUCRUM team met with the client on a daily basis to maintain momentum in order to keep the project on track for successful completion. The development and implementation was completed in nine months. Phase II enhancements were identified and completed in four months.

Benefits

• Automates and improves month-end close process, increasing employee efficiency
• Provides better management tools to run the business so that timely decisions can be made on issues such as accounts receivable aging; setting optimum inventory levels; reconciliation between financial systems and inventory systems; and evaluating the quality of purchased products used (such as lights and poles). New reporting capabilities present a snapshot of monthly activity
• Cleansing of the master data set and imposing new controls on data input ensuring data integrity moving forward
• Additional accounting functionality now includes the ability to recognize revenues, making the profitability of the business measurable for the first time
• Improves business intelligence available such as amount of new business generated and how many kilowatts were sold

“We worked closely with the client to truly understand their business processes so that we could turn them into automated business processes that improve accuracy, speed and convenience.”
John Gump Client Services Partner, LUCRUM

For more information about our work, contact us online or call (513) 241-5949 to discover how LUCRUM can maximize the power of your data.