Company Mergers.

When two large institutional investors merge, there is an urgent need to convert the data from one investment accounting system into another. This has many of the same characteristics of the implementation of a new system, with some important differences:

• The timeframe is usually shortened to 3 to 6 months. The timeframe is often dictated by management goals that cannot be changed.
• There is not as much emphasis on new processes and reports, since the processes of the surviving system simply need to be implemented with the new data from the new organization.
• Automated Reconciliation is an urgent need, and there isn't much time to implement it. Existing reconciliation systems are not easy to adapt to this new type of problem.
• Data quality is a huge concern, and there is not much time to get it right.
• The most experienced people on the in-house staff are required to spend very large amounts of time on this one time event of conversion. These same people are required for many other integration projects that are just as urgent.
• Other integration projects associated with the merger have ongoing support requirements that require the in-house staff to maintain reports and interfaces for months and years in the future. The conversion is a one-time event that requires no ongoing maintenance. As a result, the conversion is an ideal project to outsource to a consulting firm with substantial expertise in this area.
• It is extraordinarily important to have expertise in both systems involved in the conversion. They are often vendor systems with their own peculiarities.