Creating Sustainable Value: Outsourcing Finance and Accounting Business Processes

Written by:
Pete Nassos (CPA)
BPS Market Development Lead, Commercial Solutions Group, Perot Systems

Executive Summary

While most organizations use F&A processes that basically “get-the-job-done,” there are often added efficiencies they could gain. Assessing current processes and identifying opportunities for improvements, along with establishing standard operating procedures and performance metrics, have the potential to add significant business value.

Often times, a service provider can offer a disciplined approach to F&A services based on industry best practices. They can also implement technology tools and security solutions to enhance system functionality. Using a combined focus on people, processes, and technologies can provide synergies that help optimize F&A programs and best align them to overall business goals.

If you are looking to add cost efficiencies in your F&A transaction processes … “Let’s Talk”

At Perot Systems, our experience is that the best approach to providing IT and business processing services is to first listen to our clients; listening to your specific concerns, unique situation, and business objectives. Often the unspoken items, such as an organization’s culture, adaptability, preparedness for change, or recent acquisitions/divestures are critical to understanding immediate business needs. All of these factors must be incorporated into a comprehensive strategy to achieve success and harmony when undertaking organizational initiatives. We believe that understanding these ‘people values’ are especially important when building a business case to outsource services.

Lots of Data, No Information

Over time, in many organizations processes are established and inefficiencies settle in. A frequent contributor is out-dated or partially implemented financial systems. Even if 90 to 95 percent of your tasks are fully functional, the 5 to 10 percent that do not operate as intended can balloon into oversized problems. These seemingly small inefficiencies drive up the overhead and costs of your accounting services. Even though technology is often a contributing issue, it is likely that inefficiency issues are not solely attributable to your financial application systems.

In our business assessments, a key point frequently noted is the lack of standard operating procedures (SOPs); plus for many organizations, basic service level metrics are not established or measured. For instance, most firms have invested in an array of Sarbanes-Oxley flowcharts to ensure that financial transactions are properly controlled and recorded. However, most do not adequately focus on efficiency or exception processing. Further, Service Level Agreements between the accounting groups and their business units are often not defined. Establishing meaningful SLAs is an excellent initial step to identify and agree upon what business managers really want and need to improve their operations and build overall margins.

Aligning Services to Business Objectives

At Perot Systems, our client engagements have shown time and again that aligning services to meet business objectives is best achieved with a combined focus on ‘people, processes, and technology.’ We work with each client’s executive team and front line management to focus on addressing core processes and leveraging best practices to build a roadmap for improvement. This roadmap is the foundation for determining the best approach for creating sustainable value. As evidenced by our client successes and industry awards, Perot Systems has earned a reputation for meeting challenges and exceeding expectations in difficult situations at over 1,000 clients worldwide.

Creating Sustainable Value for Your Organization

When most executives hear the word outsourcing, they immediately think of offshoring, with possible cost savings from labor arbitrage. While seeking the highest value through global resources is an important part of our solution, we believe there are several aspects to any sourcing solution that must be addressed in order to create truly sustainable value.

Global Sourcing

The old adage, “you get what you pay for…” is still true. To properly utilize offshore resources, a service provider company must have a strong culture of integrity and operational excellence. These values include developing consistent methodologies based on best practices, strong training and personnel development programs, appropriate technology support, and an attitude towards continuous improvement. Our team excels at delivering a balanced resource approach that is applied consistently around the world and throughout each client engagement.

Best Practices Oriented towards Improving Service Quality

“If you cannot measure it, then you cannot manage it.” Despite best efforts towards improving internal controls to meet the requirements of various government regulations and auditing standards, many finance departments still lack basic documentation of their standard operating procedures and must rely on “tribal knowledge” for executing their critical financial transactions. Likewise, many financial functions have not established adequate KPIs, monthly metrics reporting, or evidence of continuous improvement. Take a good look at your financial documentation, and ask “What are my KPI’s and do I see any improvement in our performance?”

“Hire the best, and build from there.” Perot Systems looks to hire associates with a strong college education and prior corporate work experience. Then we place them in significant training programs to instill the “The Perot Systems Way” – an approach that stresses disciplined processes, effective project management tools, and proven customer service techniques – all delivered with personal and professional integrity.

Efficient knowledge transfer/project transition/process improvement, Perot Systems has developed an extensive transition project management methodology to ensure that your critical processes are documented and understood.

Tools/Data Security

There are many technology tools designed to streamline and improve financial processes. Systematic workflow, electronic invoices, online portals, web-based reporting solutions, and scorecards are just a few common tools that can improve your processes, inside or outside of your applications systems.

Confidentiality of corporate data is a concern in all business environments. Perot Systems has long established rigor and innovation towards providing the highest quality approach for securing data and ensuring business continuity. Our data center facilities are subject to frequent SAS70 Type II audits, conducted by a major global accounting firm, to validate that our security procedures are effective and provide the best possible secure environment. Another key practice is that whenever possible we process your financial transactions within the secure firewall of your company’s IT environment using your firm’s enterprise financial systems. Those environments are typically even more reliable when you opt to allow Perot Systems to manage your corporate applications within our highly secure data centers.

Account Governance

Improving service quality is best accomplished when your account management team focuses on understanding your business issues and helps grow your business. Perot Systems understands the importance of providing agility and adapting to change as your requirements shift. To assure that we help keep you on top of trends and opportunities, our team works every day to build trusted adviser relations with your top executives and is often on-site or traveling to your various operations.

The Perot Systems Approach

Global service delivery sourcing can provide cost savings
Improved tools to eliminate or streamline tasks and provide efficiencies over time
Best practices to improve processes and measurement
Updating applications can enhance overall efficiency of operations and facilitate future growth

Our Service Engagements Provide Benefits to our Clients that Can include:

Greater transaction processing accuracy
Enhanced service experiences for customers and vendors
Improved cash flow
Lower processing costs
Faster and more effective issue resolution
Better management insight to customer situations
Enhanced business intelligence reporting
Continuously updated documentation to support auditor and internal control requirements

Creating Sustainable Value

Perot Systems Finance & Accounting managed services include:

General Accounting including: Billing, A/R, A/P, Fixed Assets, Financial Budgeting, Forecasting, Profitability Analysis, and Management Reporting
Electronic invoicing
Workflow technology
Payroll
Business Intelligence projects
Business transformation/organizational change management
Revenue cycle solutions for hospitals and physician/clinical services
Life insurance policy and claims processing
Medical records coding and health care insurance claims processing
Document management/mailroom services
Enterprise systems selection, upgrade, and implementation (including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and others)
Financial systems application development and maintenance