In order to be able to integrate a number of activities and improve efficiency, the oil company Argos decided to implement a new treasury management system (TMS).They chose IT2 and were very satisfied with the result. This best-practice implementation provides an excellent example for other corporates, showing how such a project should be tackled.

Argos is a young oil company that combines the storage and distribution of oil with the international trade in, and sale of, mineral oils and biofuels. The roots of the company go back to 1918, when Ad van der Sluijs opened a bicycle shop in Geertruidenberg and decided to sell petrol there, too. This turned out to be a good business move because the Van der Sluijs Group went on to become a big player in the areas of sales, storage, and transport of mineral oils in the nineties.

In 2009, the group merged with FNR+, which, with its companies Frisol, North Sea Petroleum, and Reinplus Vanwoerden, is a market leader in bunkering and trading. Hence the North Sea Group came into existence. In 2011, the North Sea Group joined forces with Argos Oil. Since then, the logo is displayed at the head office in the Rotterdam harbor Waalhaven, as well as on the signs outside around 70 Dutch petrol stations and – due to the lubricants sold by the company – on the shirts of the Argos Shimano team during the Tour de France races in 2012 and 2013.

In the Western European downstream oil market, Argos is now the largest independent player (since it is not stock-market listed or state-affiliated).

More rigid

In 2015, Argos has more than 500 employees, with branches in several different European countries as well as offices in Brazil, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The turnover of the company lies between EUR 14 billion and 16 billion per year.

“Around the time of the merger between FNR+ and the Van der Sluijs Group, from which the North Sea Group was born, I started working here,” says Jan Tijmen Donkelaar, Argos’s manager of finance projects. “The market and the company have been constantly moving since then. New business was created by the merger and the internal structure also changed. In the treasury department, you need to keep up with all those developments, which entails a great deal of adjustment and steering. That requires flexibility in the set-up of your system.”

A treasury department was built up in the North Sea Group, whereby two activities needed to be integrated: the trade activities and the bunker activities, where all the LCs (letters of credit: the guarantees for oil products) were settled. That integration of the two activities gave rise to a department with a front office, a middle office, and a back office.

Donkelaar was given the task of supervising that process. “That concerned the middle office, involving setting up the processes, and I started there by implementing an online trading platform (FXall) for currency transactions.”

For the selection of a new TMS, Argos asked Zanders to advise during the request for proposal (RFP). Donkelaar notes: “The shortlist put forward by Zanders included IT2, Bellin, and SunGard. SunGard offered greater flexibility in the connection with third-party systems, while IT2 placed greater focus on the support of best-practice processes during the implementation. The latter was a better fit with our needs, and so finally we selected IT2.”

Near real-time

One important reason for choosing IT2 was that it is ‘near real-time’. Donkelaar explains: “The FX deals, for example, are fed into our system every five minutes. That isn’t live, of course, but it’s certainly fast enough for Argos.” Bart Timmerman, consultant at Zanders, adds: “Where banks require genuine real-time data, near real-time is fast enough for corporate treasuries. There are multiple currency dealers at banks, and every deal needs to be directly visible to the other traders.” At Argos, all the commodity traders are connected to FXall, an electronic trading platform for currency and money market instruments. Donkelaar says: “When our oil traders do a deal that requires FX risk cover, they put the deal into FXall. The transaction is then sent from there to treasury, which subsequently makes a transaction with a bank. The currency risk arising from oil trades is therefore covered by the traders themselves. In addition, treasury looks at the overall position on a daily basis, and the risk arising thereby is also covered. Cash optimization – if, for example, a swap needs to be made overnight – is carried out by treasury itself.”

Phased approach

Argos decided to take on the project leadership itself on the implementation of IT2. Zanders was asked to assist Argos with the implementation of the best-practice processes. The optimal set-up of the treasury processes in IT2 from a software point of view, while keeping in mind the demands from the business, is determined and fixed in the blueprinting phase – the first phase following the purchase and technical installation of the system. The oil company chose to implement a phased approach. Donkelaar says: “We started with the basics: the things we needed for our daily position management and for our LCs and guarantee summaries. This meant, for example, that we recorded all the FX deals and all the money market transactions with banks in IT2. We also wanted to build up all the historical data into the system from January 1, 2013, such as all the FX data, all the LCs and all the guarantees. From that point we could then continue to build further on the payment process and set up the accounting module, which links bookkeeping to the system. In addition, the introduction of a clear, logical division of functions and data integrity was high on the agenda.” It is an approach that is typical for this type of project, says Timmerman: “Certainly in situations where speed is needed and capacity is limited. There wasn’t a capacity problem at Argos, but treasury relied on Excel. The first thing you need to make sure of is that the basic functionality works quickly, so that the deals and cash management can be carried out well. You can then roll out the flow of payments, followed by coupling that to accounting.” “IT2 placed focus on the support of best-practice processes during the implementation” 5 Jan Tijmen Donkelaar (right) and Bart Timmerman The Argos head office in the Rotterdam harbour.

Intercompany efficiency

In this way, IT2 functions as a symbolic umbrella under which increasing numbers of functionalities can be introduced by making connections within the organization. Timmerman continues: “For the benefit of the set-up of your accounting module, you need to keep in mind that the codes you use within the organization – for example in the ERP system – can also be found in IT2. This means that during the first phase of such a project, you need to make choices concerning the set-up, which prove to be important at a later stage.” Treasury often has specific accounts, such as in-house bank accounts, and for specific products, such as interest-rate derivatives and LCs. All transactions in that area must be recorded in the general ledger and, with the accounting module, IT2 offers a means for generating the necessary journal entries in the system and exporting these to a general ledger such as Navision. “In addition, the system can also be used as a sub-ledger”, says Timmerman. “This means having your own general ledger system that, instead of journal lines, exports balance sheet items to the bookkeeping program – which can make it even easier for the accounting department.” Internal settlements can be made via an in-house banking structure, meaning that the cash management is far more efficient and savings are made on transaction costs. “The annual turnover of Argos is between 14 and 16 billion euros”, says Donkelaar. “There are around 3 billion euros of intercompany settlements. An internal structure has therefore been set up for this, and that is also picked up by the accounting module. Instructions are processed automatically; the straight-through processing (STP) has been improved enormously, which in turn leads to greater efficiency.”

Best practice

Argos’s treasury needed to change over from an Excel-based environment to a new treasury system. Within treasury there was already a lot of in-depth knowledge to set up treasury processes. However, there was also a lack of experience with system implementations. Donkelaar says: “IT2 was able to provide good support on a technical level, but we needed more substantive advice for translating the business processes and the reports. We therefore asked Zanders to help with the connection to the business, on the basis of best-practice principles. Once the blueprint had been set out and approved, we organized a number of work sessions for each different part under the supervision of Bart Timmerman, whereby firstly the system was set up and then an extensive users’ acceptance test was carried out.” Once this cycle had been completed, the system went live. “But even after the system had gone live, Zanders provided us with coaching in that area on a number of occasions, and we also received additional advice from IT2. This is a good example for other corporates as to how this should be approached.” The same approach was also applied with setting up the accounting module. Donkelaar says that the knowledge that was gained was subsequently documented. “We had three people who were directly involved with the implementation of the accounting module. This meant that all the accounting templates were tested extensively and we now have our own user’s guide of 175 pages, in which every type of transaction is described. This means that when new members of staff come to work for us, they can be trained more quickly and will therefore be able to use the module sooner.” According to Timmerman, that documented knowledge is one of the success factors of the project. “Argos also knew very clearly what it wanted. We were therefore able to carry out the set-up to a greater extent from the point of view of best practice. Still, the availability of people within the treasury organization can make or break a project such as this. Only the people who work at the corporate have the relevant specific knowledge. That is why the transfer of knowledge is so important; when a problem arises, you need to be able to solve that internally.”

More than expected

The efficiency achieved with the new system also implies a correlation between the purchase of IT2 6 “We now have our own user’s guide, in which every type of transaction is described” Jan Tijmen Donkelaar and Bart Timmerman and the number of staff in the treasury department. “No, that isn’t an immediate result,” says Donkelaar. “We wanted to achieve better capital management for treasury, meaning that we can look more strategically at the way in which money is handled; for example, the choice between paying in advance or giving guarantees in the form of LCs. And that also applies to financing arrangements: how do you deal with your working capital, and via which flows do you allow that to work? We previously did that far more on an ad hoc basis, but now with IT2 we have a much better view of that. This has meant that we’ve been able to greatly reduce the number of bank accounts. These are things that you may not immediately have in mind with a new system, but which that new system actually makes possible.”

Timmerman nods in agreement: “I often notice that many treasurers don’t immediately realize the full potential of a TMS. The implementation of a TMS usually leads to a high level of STP, which makes processes quicker, more efficient, and less subject to mistakes. The TMS offers the possibility of building more checks into the treasury processes, as well as regularly and simply being able to report on key performance indicators (KPIs). The focus shifts, as it were, from gathering data to analyzing data, not least of all, due to the time saved by the TMS. This leads to the creation of other possibilities for optimizing your working capital management. And that is an important advantage for every corporate.”

Would you like to know more about the TMS solutions of IT2? Contact us today.

A transfer to a new system is usually a complicated and time-consuming process. This particularly rings true for a company like GlobalCollect, which processes hundreds of thousands of online transactions for banks all over the world on a daily basis. How did this payment service provider (PSP) tackle the complicated challenge of adopting SWIFT as its new system?

In 1994, the current GlobalCollect was set up as a division within the old TPG Post company to ensure a well-organized payment system for parcel deliveries. Back then it was dealing with offline payments, such as cash on delivery, but when digitalization took off, the postal company decided to go online with its payment services. Now, GlobalCollect is a fast-growing company, independent of TPG Post, which processes worldwide online payments for retailers operating internationally. This PSP offers them one platform so that they do not have to deal with the complexity of various foreign banks and their payment systems.

Connections and conversions

Michael Roos, vice president of merchant boarding at GlobalCollect, says that the market for PSPs has quickly become ‘professionalized’. “The industry has developed enormously over the past 10 years, also as far as legal and statutory regulations are concerned. We fall under the supervision of the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, and are affected by the EU’s Payment Services Directive (PSD). Companies who conduct business abroad, such as airlines or online retailers, need to receive payments from abroad. That adds to the complexity as it is a huge challenge setting up all the connections. You not only have to deal with the local banker, but also with all sorts of foreign banks.” A PSP not only has all those necessary local connections but is able to offer the client various payment methods via one point of access. “As a company you then have not only the local payment method, such as iDeal in the Netherlands, but also those in other countries where you have customers.”

Since GlobalCollect processes many millions of transactions each month, it is able to compete on price – something a single company cannot do with only several hundred transactions. Customers enjoy a more favorable rate – despite working with an intermediary – than they would with a bank. Besides dealing with the complexity of connections, GlobalCollect’s clients enjoy large-scale benefits for other services, such as currency conversion. “Collection of foreign currency can be outsourced,” Roos adds. “If you get paid in Brazilian real, which is not freely convertible, we do the conversion. Clients then have quicker access to their money in their own currency.”

New for corporates

 When GlobalCollect was starting up, it began with a few bank interfaces. “But after about 15 years we had more than 50 interfaces within an out-of-date infrastructure. In order to bring this infrastructure up to a technological standard that was market compliant, we decided that SWIFT was the best solution. But to get started we didn’t have the required know-how and manpower. So when we looked around for a company with plenty of expertise we hit on Zanders. I had spoken to Sander van Tol about three or four years ago and remembered that Zanders knew a lot about SWIFT. In the spring of 2012 I met Jill Tosi and in October the project kicked off.” Zanders taught GlobalCollect about the possibilities and impossibilities of SWIFT. “And Zanders was the right choice,” says Roos. Originally, SWIFT was a connectivity channel for banks, and since 2000 it has also become available to corporates. When GlobalCollect decided to start using SWIFT’s Alliance Lite2, a new cloud-based SWIFT communication tool, it was new to the market. Roos says: “As one of the first adopters, we were working with a completely new SWIFT system.

The interfaces particularly were new and unknown.” GlobalCollect’s reason for acquiring SWIFT was twofold. On the technical side, the number of interfaces had to be reduced. On the other hand, SWIFT had to standardize formats and the provision of information. Roos adds: “In order to be able to profit from the systems we had to have good information. Good information is standardized in IT, and so we ended up with SWIFT. The way information was shared with banks had to be standardized as much as possible. This was our starting point with a kick-off on various workflows.”

Fully-fledged tool

The challenge for GlobalCollect was mainly in connecting to banks. The old interfaces had to be replaced with new ones. Whereas SWIFT has everything standardized, it appeared that the banks did not. Roos explains: “Banks who want to connect via SWIFT each send their own technical implementation document; where one sends a single Excel-sheet with technical details, another sends a 20-page contract.” Roos noticed that SWIFT, banks, and corporations were not necessarily used to dealing with each other in this context. “Particularly outside of developed markets, the banks have not come that far yet and there is a good deal of indifference. This makes project-based work and estimation of turnaround times difficult. We approached a number of banks and looked to see which ones reacted the fastest and in the most professional way, and we started with them. This is not what you would normally do. I think we got off to a good start, but the migration path will take a number of months to complete.” The time required for testing individual connections and carrying out test cases can be very long. Roos says: “SWIFT is a fully-fledged tool and the parties used to working with it are large financial institutions. For us as a young, upcoming, dynamic industry, we really have to adapt to the banks – it’s a completely different culture.”

Change of format

With the huge amount of transactions involved, a transfer to another system is risky. “Therefore we ran the two systems in parallel during the migration,” he explains. “We also deliberately decided to link the largest parties first, leaving the legacy system running as we integrated SWIFT into the organization.” This means that a back-up is not necessary. “SWIFT is a unique system, with relatively large numbers of redundancy channels and recovery scenarios, so that it can guarantee unique processing.”

According to Zanders consultant Jill Tosi, this is because SWIFT is owned by the banks: “They have so much trust in their system that they assume responsibility for payments. SWIFT has such a robust system with minimal failure percentages, that customers can put complete trust in its information process.”

At the time of transferring to the new system, GlobalCollect had a lot of IT projects on the go. The SWIFT implementation was also part of a much larger project, Process Excellence, where several systems had to be modernized in order to meet market standards. “There was a lot of pressure on the IT department at GlobalCollect,” Tosi says. “The electronic banking systems were all stand-alone, i.e. not integrated into the daily processes. There were about 50 electronic banking systems, and someone had to log into each one separately with a different token each day. For one or two that is feasible, but 50 is too many.” And Roos adds: “The whole idea was to continue with significantly fewer interfaces – preferably one. And we are still very busy with that.”

While GlobalCollect was carrying out the migration to the new system, the banks were right in the middle of the SEPA migration. “That had consequences for the introduction of new formats within SWIFT,” Roos says. “We had to make a decision: do we go for MT940, the old standard for bank statements, or do we go for CAMT 053, the XML-successor of MT940? XML is a future-proof format but is not offered by all banks. As a consequence of SEPA, some banks will have to be migrated twice: firstly to MT940 and then to XML. An interesting aside is that where SWIFT offers the version 2.0 solution to corporations, many banks are just not ready for SWIFT connectivity with businesses. A number of large Anglo-Saxon banks have indicated that MT940 interfaces are not yet available for a direct connection to SWIFT Alliance Lite2 with corporates.”

Business as usual

The SWIFT migration to large banks is over and this year other banks will follow. After the first three banks, Zanders withdrew from the process. "It is now more like business as usual,” says Roos. "Zanders not only did the implementation, but was also responsible for the learning curve in our company. We have become self-supporting as far as SWIFT is concerned.” After the SWIFT project, Zanders also helped GlobalCollect with the selection and implementation of a new treasury management system (TMS) and a reconciliation tool. "Messages coming from SWIFT could be uploaded to our TMS straight away,” Roos says. "The same goes for our reconciliation system. If we didn’t have the standardization of the SWIFT system, it would have been much harder. In the banks’ own technical file formats there is a degree of standardization, but it’s not complete. It is clear to us that getting the standard functionality working would not have been possible without the successful implementation of SWIFT Alliance Lite2.”

Sulzer is a Swiss company specializing in reliable, sustainable solutions for performance-critical applications, focusing on industrial machinery, surface technology, and rotating equipment maintenance. Active in key markets like oil and gas, power, water, and transportation, Sulzer enhances customer competitiveness through innovation. The company operates over 170 locations worldwide.

Expansion into new markets brings challenges on many levels, not least of all financially. When Sulzer, a leading provider of products and solutions in markets such as oil and gas, power, water, and transportation, decided that it needed best-practice treasury and cash management processes to support the developing business operations, the two-pronged treasury project required some external help. Zanders was able to advise on and facilitate a European cash concentration structure and a TMS implementation project.

Sustainable value creation and profitable growth are the ultimate strategic priorities of the company and the financial side of Sulzer’s organization has to be flexible to keep up with the changing patterns of cash flows, revenue streams, investments, and new risk exposures. Treasury needs to move with the challenging cash management environments in new markets, often in developing countries around the world, and it was decided that treasury processes and structures needed to be updated. In 2008, Sulzer’s treasury team embarked on a dual project to implement a new treasury management system (TMS) as well as a new European cash concentration structure.

“In an ideal world we would be able to monitor all the subsidiaries’ transaction data by having access to a data warehouse”

Jean-Daniel Millasson (Corporate Treasurer at Sulzer)

Need for a treasury realignment

Jean-Daniel Millasson, the corporate treasurer at Sulzer, explains that the company has grown organically but also considerably through acquisitions. Today, it has a production and service network of over 170 locations around the world, while back in 2008 it had about 120. He says: “We have legal entities in many countries and each has its own set of bank accounts, banking relationships, and manages its payments and cash management independently of the treasury center in Switzerland, although we give clear directions and guidelines for their treasury activities. We feel it’s very important to further develop in the area of cash and risk management, hence centralizing business support functions such as treasury is a vital way to achieve higher efficiencies, greater transparency and access to real-time information across a broad geographic area.”

With this in mind, one clear goal of this treasury project was to improve cash management and visibility by implementing a Europe-wide zero-balancing cash pool. Equally important was the selection and implementation of a new TMS. Millasson says: “It was clear for me that we needed external support to realize two projects of this magnitude since we are a small treasury team. We therefore decided to conduct a request for proposals (RFP), after which Zanders was selected.”

Cash pool implementation project

The cash pool implementation involved intense interviewing and liaising with Sulzer’s European subsidiaries. Eric Schwarz, head of the corporate treasury center at Sulzer, explains that this data-collection phase of the project was time-consuming. Zanders consultant Bart Timmerman carried out many of these visits and fact-finding missions with Sulzer or on the company’s behalf.

Schwarz says: “During the cash concentration project, Zanders contributed to the success by taking care of that part of the project that we just didn’t have the resources for. They were able to collect and collate data and meet our subsidiaries. Although we at Sulzer didn’t lack the expertise to go ahead and implement the kind of Europe-wide cash concentration structure that we had in mind, Zanders was able to alleviate an important part of the hard work where we needed support.”

The objectives of the cash concentration project were to increase the centralization of cash, to improve visibility of cash balances and flows in Europe, to improve efficiency of cash management, and to later leverage the platform across the organization in a broad geographical sense covering different time zones. The cash concentration project also included an analysis and redesign of the company’s European banking infrastructure and was successfully concluded in 2009.

Gaining visibility and control

The second phase of Sulzer’s treasury transformation was initiated at the same time as the cash concentration project. In fact, the TMS implementation was partially triggered by the need for a best practice system to manage the transaction data generated by the European cash concentration project.

Millasson explains that the previous TMS was not operating in line with best practice and there were still manual processes involved that prevented automated processing of data: “Having a zero-balancing cash pool created a high number of transactions for us – which meant more work for the back office. With the new TMS in place, we’re able to handle this workload. Previously, we didn’t have straight-through processing (STP) or electronic bank statements through our front or back offices,” he says.

Expert advice was invaluable during the selection of a new TMS provider. Sulzer first of all consulted Judith van Paassen, partner at Zanders, and then worked closely with Zanders consultant Bart Timmerman. Millasson adds: “For the TMS project, Zanders’ expertise was crucial. We were looking for professional support on the evaluation of different systems and also on the implementation at a later stage. Even for an experienced treasury department it is difficult to make a decision on an individual system. It was therefore invaluable to work with experts who have in-depth knowledge of the systems.”

Eventually IT2 was chosen but it couldn’t become fully functional until the cash concentration structure was in place, because of the need to have a clear view of the new bank reporting infrastructure. Although IT2 went live with FX deals and reporting in 2009, the full implementation was completed in 2010. Bart Timmerman worked closely with the Sulzer treasury team on the TMS implementation but was also present for much of the European cash pool project. He says: “The two projects were complementary. It was an opportunity for the company to make better use of its idle cash. However, implementing a cash pool without a TMS would have been impossible.”

Millasson adds: “The benefit of the TMS was also that it enabled us to carry out compliance and reporting. It has made a big difference in terms of improving our processes. Of course, data quality is crucial for risk management, too.”

Continuous improvements

While the new TMS has introduced best practice treasury processes, there are still some areas that could be improved, according to Sulzer’s Millasson. He says: “We try to be in a position to best monitor our entities but what we can monitor is limited. We don’t have a common ERP system in the group, which given our business model is not essential, but makes it more difficult for us to access detailed transaction data. At the moment we have to rely on data sent to us by subsidiaries and their analysis. In an ideal world we would be able to monitor all the subsidiaries’ transaction data by having access to a data warehouse.”

In 2011, the new IT2 accountancy module was added for the company’s new cash pool in Australia. Millasson says: “Thanks to Zanders’ knowledge of TMS, this was a short and smooth project, which was nonetheless very important for us.” Currently, Timmerman and his colleague Tobias Schaad are upgrading IT2 to the latest release, while looking at possible enhancements and extended functionality simultaneously with the treasury staff of Sulzer.

“These projects support internal and external growth by concentrating processes
and increasing efficiency”

Jean-Daniel Millasson (Corporate Treasurer at Sulzer)

Future support for a developing business

As Sulzer continues to develop and grow, both geographically and in terms of its markets and technology innovation, Millasson and Schwarz now feel it is well supported by treasury. Millasson says: “We still want our business to grow, so you need to finance it. These projects support internal and external growth by concentrating processes and increasing efficiency – these contribute to growth.”

And like the operational side of the company, Sulzer’s treasury team is not likely to let the grass grow under its feet. Rather, they are constantly looking for improvements to their financial processes. Millasson says: “The immediate projects and priorities are still efficient, to make better future use of the TMS in certain areas, to make processes even leaner, which means having electronic dealing and electronic data submissions from legal entities through the TMS. We also want to roll out our cash concentration strategy to more countries such as Singapore and China.”

Treasury is also considering doing some work to establish meaningful and effective key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business. Millasson explains: “The benefits of KPIs are twofold: a means for continuous improvement and illustrating Treasury’s contribution to the business’s financial performance, and a prerequisite for being able to benchmark against other treasuries. Furthermore, we continuously assess opportunities to expand our in-house bank activities, for instance, by considering how payment factory solutions in certain regions could add value to Sulzer.”

Timmerman summarizes the overall feeling about Sulzer’s treasury project: “What was interesting was that there was dedication at Sulzer and there was a really strong drive to lift the treasury practice one level higher. As clients, they were open about shortfalls in their processes and supporting systems, and this really contributed to the quality and progress of the project. Taking on both projects together was a real challenge and, ultimately, it went very well.”

When Coca-Cola Hellenic (CCH), one of the biggest bottlers and sellers of Coca-Cola products in the world, implemented SAP in 2008, the treasury team expected great improvements in cash management and financial communication across the 28 countries in which the group operates. The reality was somewhat different, with the implemented version of SAP not interacting in harmony with CCH’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, called Wave 1. It was at that point that the newly appointed treasurer, Bart Jansen, decided to re-design and improve the SAP implementation – with help from Zanders.

When Bart Jansen joined CCH treasury in 2008, he might have been forgiven for thinking that he had joined at the perfect time – the company had just gone live with SAP Treasury. So with the latest technology already in place, surely Jansen would be able to focus on the bigger treasury issues?

He soon found that the treasury team in Athens was far from happy with how SAP was running. Treasury operated a stand-alone ERP5 installation that had to integrate with three SAP kernels at different versions of SAP. There was repetition of functions and lack of integration. Jansen explains that there were high levels of dissatisfaction with the functionality of the system among CCH’s users: “I started the new job as treasurer in the midst of the financial crisis with a team that was quite frustrated with their tools and also understaffed. I needed to do something drastic about this, so I called Judith van Paassen at Zanders.”

Jansen’s relationship with Zanders goes back a long way. As a Dutch national, he was previously treasurer at Dutch utility group Nuon, where he carried out a successful system implementation with Zanders. “After that experience, I knew that Zanders were knowledgeable about SAP, so when I moved to CCH in Athens, it was a natural step to call them,” he says. CCH sent out a request for proposal (RFP) and Zanders won the selection process.

Once Zanders had become involved in the project, things started to move quickly. Jansen says: “Bas Rebel and Bart Mol came over and worked with us in early 2009 and helped to identify 70 ‘gaps’, or weaknesses, in our process. While we identified some ‘quick wins’, we also realized that a lot more effort was required to address more structural issues.”

Integrating treasury with Wave 2

The aim of the SAP implementation was to upgrade the system to fit in more coherently with the Wave 2/ECC6 template. Every country treasury unit had its own banking partner and was communicating in its own way, so this also had to be upgraded to Wave 2. Jansen explains how the project team worked to resolve these issues: “With help from Zanders we started to develop a business case that would solve our immediate and long-term structural issues related to the tools we use and the way we interact with our 28 countries. We now have a more integrated solution – particularly for FX and cash management data – that complies with the latest standards and strengthens communications.”

The business case was approved for the implementation project in November 2009 and work started on it in January 2010. As with any major implementation involving many different disciplines, it was not without some challenges. Jansen says: “One of the difficulties was the tight corporate deadlines regarding the Wave 2 roll-out. We had to comply with the Wave 2 deadlines imposed upon us by our own company, so we had to get the project started quickly.”

Communication is key

One of the challenges of working with an international team of consultants, according to Jansen, was getting people together in the same place: “The complexity of the system and the solution meant we had to involve several experts from different fields. Ultimately it was a matter of finding the right experts and getting them together, for example getting the people from Zanders together with our IT people. It wasn’t easy as they were not always in the same country, but we still managed to communicate and address the issues.”

Zanders partner Laura Koekkoek adds: “We’re very pleased with the professional way the project has been run – in particular the testing phase was taken very seriously. We had a lot of people working together on this, so communication has been crucial.”

Complex challenge

The best advice is always to stay as close to the standard version of SAP. Although this isn’t always possible, it helps to keep the complexity at a manageable level. We absolutely benefited from Zanders’ expertise and knowledge of SAP in this regard.

Bart Jansen, Treasurer at CCH

With a complex system, designing the security and access rights has also been a time-consuming operation, as Jansen explains: “We spent a lot of time designing the authorization system, bearing in mind the segregation of duties within the company, and that has been really challenging on an integrated platform. We worked on this with internal auditors, and it was one of the most important aspects before we went live.”

A pleasant working environment

So despite the pressures and complexity of this SAP implementation, is CCH happy with the results? For Bart Jansen, the most important gauge of the project’s success was whether his treasury team in Athens was happy with the tools and system. “It has been a great success from that point of view,” he says. “They were previously spending a lot of time on administration and spreadsheets, whereas now they can spend time on more meaningful tasks. We have been able to streamline processes and thereby reduce time spent on certain tasks by 30–50%, while the controls have significantly improved. So the team has a much more manageable workload and therefore a more pleasant working environment.”

CCH’s treasury is now in the process of rolling out SwiftNet and the SAP Bank Communication Management module to the country units, replacing the local electronic banking system functionality. This year they will begin work on an in-house bank, and once that is completed, they will set up a payments factory as part of the SAP system. Jansen adds: “We are now in the process of fully automating foreign currency accounting. We’re making a significant investment into the Wave2 platform. So we are already seeing significant benefits and hope to see more in the future.”