Redesigning an organization’s financial data model depends on senior executive support and a quality crossfunctional team for ultimate success. The actual methodology involves other stakeholders within the organization during key design checkpoints. After all, financial data and reporting are the common business language within an organization ,so the extent of interested parties is quite wide .Figure 4 summarizes the overall design approach.
Build Commitment
A project of this magnitude must have senior executive sponsorship . If the sponsor is high enough in the organization, such as the CFO, it may only require a few wellplaced “sound bites” or appearances during the course of the overall effort to maintain momentum . It’s also necessary to get those at the director or controller level to agree that the status quo is no longer acceptable. To gain their support, invite key people to a workshop where the problems with the existing environment are clearly articulated along with the benefits of a more standardized financial data model. Interest real-world example of successes at other companies,and brainstorming so the attendees can put together their own lists of problems and benefit.Once the group agrees something must be done and sponsorship is in place, it’s time to move on to planning and mobilizing the project.
Planning and Mobilization
The beginning of the project should focus on planning and on selecting and mobilizing the team. The plan should provide the roadmap for how the design process will unfold and should allow for buy-in and involvement from the key stakeholder group identified during the initial commitment-building workshop. The plan should define project objectives and scope clearly.
The framework introduced in Figure3 would be a helpful starting point to egin articulating components that will or will not be incorporated into the scope of the redesign effort. Other obvious elements include parts of the organization, levels of detail, and whether the design or is in conjunction with an ERP implementation. If the redesign takes place in conjunction with an ERP implementation, then the conceptual design will need to be translated into a detailed system design that includes numbering schemes for each of the codes and identification of where each code will reside within various modules of the ERP application.