Man Group plc, a leading global provider of alternative investment products and solutions as well as one of the worlds largest futures brokers, has placed an order valued in excess of 50k with IT Services Group Touchstone for a SunSystems 5 financial system and EASYWARE Document Management Solution that will improve and enhance its management reporting. As a result of easy and secure access to shared documents and resources, the Corporate Accounting department of Man Group expects to improve its level of customer service and significantly increase operational efficiency, halving the time spent retrieving critical documents to support the management of its Corporate cost centres.
The Corporate Accounting section of Man Group identified the need to streamline processes and make document management a key component of their reporting strategy. Corporate Accounting provides financial information to cost centres across the division a largely manual process which is currently handled by a team of four. A query about budgetary spend might involve a lengthy interrogation of the accounting system for invoice numbers and a protracted search through filing cabinets in order to retrieve the source documentation. This makes the current reconciliation process for answering these budgeting queries very labour intensive and time consuming.
Scott Waters, Corporate Accounting Manager at Man Group explains, We deal with a large number of internal cost centres, that contribute to the overall corporate overheads. Our responsibility is to provide these budget holders with accurate and up-to-date information about their actual costs, so they are able to plan and forecast effectively. We have a reputation for service delivery and the system from Touchstone will help us to maintain and indeed extend that reputation. It will also offer huge benefits in terms of time saved.
Man Group approached IT services group Touchstone, who already supply and support the organisations SunSystems financial system, due to their thorough understanding of the organisations systems and processes as well as their business issues led approach to a project. Touchstone recommended the EASYWARE document management system because of its ability to interface seamlessly with SunSystems, enabling the acceleration of document retrieval. Touchstone also recommended upgrading SunSystems to version 5, because of its improved data-capture and improved user interface.
Waters comments, The new document management system will allow the Corporate Accounting team to spend more time resolving discrepancies rather than looking for them, offering a more efficient service to our cost centre budget holders. SunSystems 5 offers a modern, easy-to-use interface and the intention is for budget-holders to eventually interrogate the financial information for themselves as opposed to the Corporate Accounting team having to trawl through filing systems. But its not just the finance team who will benefit from the system, he continues. Other Corporate departments have expressed an interest in this solution for general document retention such as legal documents and regulatory agreements as we strive to save storage space and achieve greater operational efficiency.
Man Group purchased a full suite of modules, including EASY CAPTURE to manage the acquisition and recognition of electronic documents, EASY DMS to forward and edit documents, and EASY LINK OBJECTS to search and access documents. Touchstone will implement a SunSystems 5 system, incorporating Financials and a full suite of modules, on a SQL server platform. Both solutions are now live.
Waters concludes: The system will inevitably increase staff productivity as a result of the improved efficiency of business processes and increased access to management information. The potential roll-out of the system to other areas within Corporate will deliver yet greater benefits. Touchstones professionalism and support has been key in helping us achieve this.
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