New Account Opening (NAO)

It appears that Phil Ayres and I stumbled across each other from two different sides of the world at pretty much the same time. While I was reading his excellent blog on New Account Opening last night he appears to have been responding to one of my posts on risk removal - gotta love that Internet.

Phil's background and experience are perhaps in a strata of business that we don't have much of a footprint in and the challenges of efficiently and effectively managing NAO in a mid tier organisations are admittedly less complex and far less volume driven than the banking industry - but just as important and challenging for the mid tier enterprise. In the pursuit of bringing process improvements into the SunSystems arena we have perhaps developed what has been coined by Gartner a Composite Process Solution (CPS)

WARNING - unashamedly commercial plug from this point on:

Workflow for SunSystems from Professional Advantage is a "boxed set" of predefined, non-transactional process templates within a BPMS that allows SunSystems installations to automate the control of their master data management (MDM) or customer data integration (CDI). Boy there's a lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) in that - and they're all for real - I don't make this stuff up!

What all that actually means is ...... when you want to open a new account in SunSystems you initiate, direct, manage and complete the process through a browser based set of workflow rules and screens that control things like:

- who is allowed to request a new account be opened (in our business just sales department and management people)

- what initial information about the account is required before the request can be submitted (like division/business unit engaging with the client, client name, address, company registration (needs to be unique in our customer database and gets auto validated against the online government portal), primary contacts etc etc)

- what is the first step of review and approval (in our business the Sales Manager confirms we are willing to sell this product and service combination at this price point etc).

- what is the next step of data gathering, verification and approval - classically at the B2B trading level we want to check trading references (force a minimum of three perhaps?), credit agency reports (rating must be greater than "orange" perhaps?) etc

- then what information do we need to issue the client in terms of bank details for electronic payment, contact details for query resolution etc for their financial systems (afterall if we are setting them up as a client they are setting us up as a supplier). This can be sent as an email or as a link to a web page for them to review and complete as required.

- penultimately a senior fincancial manager reviews all the steps to date and approves the work to date

- then a client, chart of account and contact record are automatically created in the target SunSystems database (optionally supported by the creation of equivalent records in other line of business applications - CRM, sales invoicing, distribution etc etc) - nobody logs into SunSystems to do all that, it just happens automatically with all the data collated during the approval process, and hey, no keyboard errors either.

- and finally an email to the original sales executive confirming creation of the new account with the relevant reference code if required and the whole lot gets archived away

Throughout the timeline there are activity and bottleneck reports available and extensive reporting options for auditing and compliance management (hello SOX, Clerp 9, Basel 2 et al)

In the real world it's not just new clients of course, so we have the same for suppliers, assets, account and transaction analysis codes (A codes and T codes in Sun-speak). In the background we have stacked up a few HR processes as well including leave management, employee onboarding, travel request and advances management, employee expenses and the like.

These templates come out of the box in Workflow for SunSystems and seamlessly integrate to SunSystems 4 and 5 installations on the MS SQL and Oracle database platforms. They can be implemented "as is" or modified slightly or substantially to better fit the company policies and procedures. I would be the first to acknowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to risky processes in a business. However the added benefit of Workflow for SunSystems being contained in a BPMS is that other processes identified in the organisation can be mapped and automated over time within the one common framework (even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with SunSystems itself).

Phil Ayres challenged me to be able to "show it in action" with "an implementation of less than 30 days" - we can install in an afternoon! I can "show and tell" by Webex - gotta love that Internet.

UPDATE - 16 June 2006: Access to Workflow for SunSystems doesn't have to be restricted to within the corporate firewall - being browser based it can easily be published to customers, suppliers, the supply chain in general - to enable people to initiate and be involved in processes specific to them. For example, we can allow suppliers to enter their own invoice online (forcing a valid PO number to be entered if required), attach a document image as support and submit for processing by accounts payable. How's that for a way to drive down those administration costs? Just one of many that can be addressed with Workflow for SunSystems.