Mortgage Company is mortgage originator with operations throughout the United States. Headquartered in Florida, Our client originates mortgages through both wholesale and retail channels. With over 2000 employees in multiple states, managing financial performance, benefits, payroll, and regulatory requirements required an integrated system. To help keep up with their rapidly growing business and employee population, our client made the decision to select and implement enterprise Financial and Human Resource Management Systems (FIS/HRMS).

Our goal was to assist them with the following:

• Strategic planning for enterprise systems selection and replacement
• Identify potential FIS/HRMS vendors to include in the selection process
• Document functional and technical application requirements
• Prepare a Request for Proposal and distribute to selected vendors
• Develop preliminary project budget
• Request and review the critical information from each vendor for contract inclusion
• Evaluation of RFP responses and selection of vendor finalists to participate in scripted demonstrations
• Prepare for and conduct “scripted demonstrations” with client’s data to review specific functionality
• Evaluation of vendor presentations
• Development of a detailed plan for data conversion
• Development of a detailed integration plan that addresses the impact on other critical functional areas and systems within our client organization
• Contract design and negotiations
• Development of an implementation plan based on the selected vendor
• Ongoing assistance with vendor compliance and management during the implementation
• Design and implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance environment
• Assistance with continued strategic planning to align with corporate long terms goals
• Assistance in selecting and engaging additional resources as needed
• Assistance in implementing additional modules as required by users
• Assisted the client in saving several million dollars in vendor expenditures over the course of the project

Solution/Approach
MAS developed the requirements matrix utilizing our Critical Venture (TM) database and information gathered from the client user community. We developed strategic as well as functional requirements, interviewed vendors, designed demo scripts and demonstration prototypes, managed vendor demos and evaluated the results. When the client narrowed down the list of potential vendors to two, MAS and senior management conducted headquarter visits at both Peoplesoft and Oracle. MAS continued to assist the client in contract negotiation for both the software purchase and implementation consulting engagement. We assisted our client in negotiating a significant discount on their application licenses, annual support and implementation services. Our successful selection services led the client to request further assistance during their implementation.
Some of the templates and deliverables we provided to the mortgage company from our Critical Venture database are:

• Functional and Technical Requirements matrices
• Request For Information /Proposal templates
• Vendor demonstration prototypes
• Detailed integration and data conversion plans
• Vendor specific contract negotiation templates
• Implementation plans for the selected vendors and applications
• Contract compliance templates
• Project reporting and management templates

Results
Our client completed the implementation of core financials as well as base Human Resource Mangement systems. As a result of the detailed guidance and expertise provided, all projects to date have been completed successfully. As a result of our selection methodology, our client was able to make a well-informed, business driven selection of the Oracle Financial and HRMS applications (11i) thus avoiding the confusion and instability of selecting an application that could be desupported soon in the future.