What can an EDMS beyond the borders of the office: Treasury automation

    We continue a series of articles on the topic " EDMS: the path from simple to complex ."
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    Is it possible with the help of EDMS to automate the control of treasury activity in a company whose divisions and subsidiaries are located at a great distance from each other? It depends on what kind of EDMS you have. We’ll make a reservation right away: it’s not about reducing all business processes to shifting “pieces of paper” and simulating the work of all departments according to the principle of clerical work. Not at all!
    The fact is that the narrow-subject approach to the development of business applications, including EDMS, has long been in the past. Today, any decent system has a fair amount of flexibility and functionality, so it can be used to solve atypical tasks. And so it happened in the vertically integrated oil company NK Alliance, where, due to the intensive workflow and the need to organize effective interaction between users from different regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, the choice of the TESIS EDMS as a platform was more than successful.

    Treasury is the processing of applications


    For reference: The Treasury is one of the key divisions of a usually holding organization, coordinating the work of all financial services of subsidiaries and divisions. The main objective of this financial structure is to ensure uninterrupted cash flow with both external counterparties and within the organization.

    Each payment is an event, a transaction that needs to be calculated, agreed upon and executed. That is, it is a certain document (or a package of documents) that must go through a certain approval route and its implementation must be monitored. That sounds a lot like setting a task for implementing an EDMS, right? Only the document itself is specific - not some kind of memo, but a complex object, with fields calculated by certain business rules and exchanging data with other systems. That is, here we climb a little into the clearing of ERP.

    Alliance NC used a separate budgeting system that did not suit the customer. At that time, we worked with the organization and have already successfully implemented the TESIS document management system.. It contains a very decent toolkit for managing business processes and an entity constructor inherited from CUBA (the platform on which the THESIS SED is written). Thus, you can create your own types of objects and set the rules for their processing. And the functions of assignment and control are basically invariant with respect to the subject area, so our experience from the EDMS turned out to be quite applicable.

    Why did you need to change the old system


    The golden rule "it works - just do not touch anything" is applicable to a certain limit, as long as people are ready to endure the inconvenience of the old system and see no other real alternatives. In our case, there were two annoying factors:
    • Separation, because of which curators had to work in two systems, and financiers in three. The result was data inconsistency, re-entry and errors.
    • Inability to work in a geographically dispersed environment to ensure interaction between holding enterprises and data consolidation.

    And yet (this was already discovered at the implementation): During the trial operation, reports were prepared in two systems, the old and the new. One of the reports found a discrepancy. Naturally, they declared this a bug of the new system. However, when everything was carefully checked manually, I had to admit that this was a mistake of the old system.

    OK, all programmers are wrong, it happens. But logical errors that can be caught at the testing stage are one thing and errors are another matter because of the unreliable architecture: what works well for one user does not always scale well in a distributed multi-user environment.

    In the old budgeting system, problems arose due to the use of the joint table editing mode - such a mechanism for inputting primary data was provided, but it is difficult to control the integrity of the data. In THESIS, all transactions go straight through the server, and such a collision simply cannot happen.

    Integration is good for an integrator, but not always for a customer


    A large organization cannot be automated with a single system, having hung all the tasks on it - this is the truth of life. There will certainly be tasks for which a functional customer will require to implement some special solution, and then if you please, provide end-to-end business processes! This, of course, pleases integrators, and the customer’s IT service is far from always.

    But what is completely unacceptable by modern standards is the presence of "islands of automation" - separate systems that cannot be included in the general circuit of information exchange. Alliance NC was faced with just such a situation: the system used by the Treasury at that time was completely isolated - it did not interact with accounting or the EDMS.

    Therefore, with sober reflection, the customer decided to reduce the number of systems and abandon the previous solution, shifting its functional “responsibilities” to TESIS. From an architectural point of view, such a simplification of the landscape is an undoubted benefit. If the problem can be solved with fewer systems, it is imperative to do so.

    In 1C you can’t drive all users


    Until the accountant creates a payment order in his 1C and sends this payment to the bank, the money will not go anywhere, even if your application was agreed and approved at least three times. If you bring it to the accounting department on paper or even send it as a document by e-mail, you will have to wait for the accountant to hammer your data into his system. And these applications are darkness and darkness.
    You, as always, need urgently, right? So help the accountant, fill out the payment yourself. Do not know how to work in 1C? It’s clear ... In the same way, the accountant does not want to learn extra systems. Therefore, in order not to strain anyone, we decided to submit all the approval processes to TESIS, and thanks to the proven integration mechanisms with 1C, implement the interaction of the companies in the holding.

    “So in 1C there is also a document flow!” - the attentive reader will say. And he will be right, but the customer received negative experience with this product on another project, and did not want to risk it again. And the story with TESIS developed quite positively - the document management system was already in commercial operation.
    As a result, all initiators of payments themselves make in TESIS applications for payment (mostly according to templates), on the basis of which payments are made in 1C, and for an accountant it is enough to simply check them and not fill them from scratch.

    Not everything went smoothly


    Suppose the technical capabilities of the system allow you to do anything - at least a document flow, at least a treasury, at least sell seeds - at the market or at the exchange. Flexibility - 100%. Essence and processes - whatever. But why do we see that companies, even equipped with universal tools, very slowly penetrate into new subject areas? Because in any business, you need to gain expertise before everything is easy to get.

    An application for payment is not an ordinary memo, which has only a number and a date. In every new business, there are nuances, so I had to redo the product as requirements were clarified and knowledge was accumulated.
    Here, for example: at first they made it simple - one application - one budget item. It turned out that this is not entirely convenient, because one application can go through different articles, for example, when, within the framework of a single contract, services for its installation / implementation are carried out along with some product.

    Taking into account the monthly financial planning, on the basis of which ultimately the applications for making payments are formed, the ability to flexibly work with these payments is extremely important. The implemented control system of treasury activity on the basis of thesis Thesis allowed to reduce the time for working with financial applications due to the possibility of forming a single application, which is first included in the financial plan, and then immediately after signing the primary documents is sent for approval for payment, which is quite typical in 90% cases.

    Employees of financial services, in turn, were able to split the application into several payments, transfer them between months and carry out lower-level planning using the payment calendar.

    Reason for pride


    In general, the TEZIS team successfully completed the project. On the basis of the EDMS, a system was developed to automate the work of the Treasury in a large holding, which provides work with the cash flow budget, check limits, coordinate and plan payments, track payment facts.
    The customer was completely satisfied with the new solution. As often happens, for some time during the implementation process, users have to work simultaneously in two systems, and since people are conservative, the new one sometimes takes root with difficulty, under administrative pressure. In NK “Alliance” this did not happen. (Again, due to the fact that the automation of the Treasury was essentially an extension of the EDMS functionality.)

    The geographical factor often destroys the most correctly written plans, and remote communication does not always compensate for the living. And here, too, everything was successful. Judge for yourself: a functional customer in Moscow, a developer in Samara, and implementations throughout Russia. At the same time, only two business trips were required - to launch the project and to surrender. The rest of the time we talked remotely, but very intensively, even breaking all records at the customer’s company for the duration of conference calls via Skype. Of course, they saved money on business trips, but there is one more thing: high-level financial service employees who were always very busy should have become users - you could have caught them near their offices for days on end, wasting your analyst’s time in vain, while a Skype conversation could be planned at a convenient time for everyone.

    Do not be afraid of new challenges, but do not climb into trouble


    Realizing the task of managing the treasury, we actually invaded the territory of ERP with our EDMS system. This was made possible thanks to the universal CUBA platform, and in principle there are no architectural and technical obstacles in order to develop a full-featured ERP on this platform.
    To summarize, we can conclude:
    Having an EDMS in the hands of which is based on a universal flexible platform, you can get involved in a wide variety of projects that go far beyond the scope of traditional workflow. The risk is not associated with the technical side, but exclusively with competence in the subject area.
    Of course, the EDMS will not replace ERP or CRM, in order to bring the custom solution to the level of the product, you will have to work hard - and this will be another story. If someone undertakes - welcome! Stopper here can only be a lack of relevant competencies in the subject area.

    The history of this project and customer reviews can be found here .

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