Enabling Worldwide Financial Services Provider to Seamlessly Upgrade Mission-critical HRMS System

The Client
A worldwide financial services leader, this clients’ businesses provide individuals and corporations with a broad array of products and services, including mutual funds, annuities, real estate brokerage franchises, relocation services and life insurance.

The Challenge
In keeping with its continuous improvement, employee empowerment and cost containment goals, this financial market leader decided to upgrade its PeopleSoft® HRMS application from an aging mainframe-based version 7.5 to PeopleSoft’s robust, Web-based version 8.9. This migration would enable the company to:

  • Eliminate numerous time-consuming processes
  • Integrate cross-department data to facilitate timely information sharing
  • Give managers the ability to perform HR functions online, such as performance tracking and timecard approval
  • Allow employees across the enterprise to reap all the benefits of a Web-based application

Although the Internet-based PeopleSoft application offered numerous benefits, it was a whole new concept for the organization and its implementation was not without risk. To ensure the success of this complex undertaking, the company needed to supplement its project team with experienced PeopleSoft experts who had both technical expertise and business acumen.

The Solution
Contech Systems, an IT consulting services firm specializing in PeopleSoft application integration, had been providing exceptional resources to the financial services company for several years. Based on its proven track record, significant PeopleSoft experience and deep network of industry-leading consultants, Contech Systems was engaged to provide the expert resources needed to ensure a smooth implementation. “We knew that with Contech Systems, we would be able to quickly get the caliber of people with the technical expertise and business acumen that matched our needs,” said the client’s Chief Information Officer.

The caliber of Contech Systems’ consultants was evident from the start, when it filled the initial requirement for a PeopleSoft functional analyst with an individual so highly skilled she was quickly elevated to the role of project manager. As the project evolved, Contech Systems delivered seven additional PeopleSoft functional and technical specialists to augment the clients’ team in these areas:

  • Functional analysis
  • Technical liaison
  • Quality assurance
  • Testing
  • Technical writing
  • Change management
  • Internal communication

Throughout the project’s lifecycle, the project manager supplied by Contech Systems oversaw the combined team’s performance and acted as a liaison to the client’s external system developer to ensure business needs were met. Meanwhile, Contech Systems consultants served as project team mentors, sharing best practices and using their experience and insight to help the team proactively identify and overcome roadblocks along the way. “Having consultants on the team that had done this before and knew what they were doing helped us avoid mistakes and achieve project milestones,” said the CIO. “Contech consultants knew how to communicate and readily transferred their skills and knowledge to our employees.”

Over the course of several months, the team completed a series of upgrade steps, from functional review and fit gap analysis to data migration, culminating in user acceptance testing and training.

Contech Systems consultants played an integral role in helping the project team:

  • Streamline and consolidate time-intensive processes
  • Achieve critical milestones
  • Map and migrate data from 25 different interfaces and numerous custom reports into a new application

With the support of Contech Systems’ PeopleSoft experts, the new version was launched according to plan, with minimal disruption to the organization. “The implementation was as close to seamless as you can get,” said the CIO.

The Results
The best practices and innovations that Contech Systems consultants brought to the table enabled the client to realize the full potential of the new version and achieve maximum value from it. This powerful new application allowed the client to:

  • Eliminate costs and risks associated with maintaining an older, unwieldy application that was becoming more difficult and expensive to support
  • Remove laborious, expensive, and inefficient processes
  • Reduce infrastructure costs by moving to a single system
  • Increase the level of strategic and consultative support provided by HR by transferring employee-related tasks to managers and reducing the time needed to execute basic HR business processes
  • Empower business users by giving them access to new types of information
  • Increase employee satisfaction by empowering individuals to take ownership of their HR benefit portfolio through online access to HR information and e-pay and e-benefit capabilities

“Contech System's consultants were as invested in the success of this project as we were. They worked in partnership with our team and supplied the PeopleSoft knowledge and skills we needed,” concluded the CIO. “In fact, their consultants were so valuable that we have retained several of them to help with additional projects.”

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