Making a greenfield finance transformation project
Our customer is a full-service commercial insurer leveraging over 150 years of experience. By offering innovative, highly customized products to standard insurance products they help protect medium-sized and large corporations around the globe.
In 2015, a finance transformation program was started, a greenfield initiative intended to address the specific needs of the direct insurance model, and Aptitude Software was chosen as the technology to underpin this new initiative.
After 3 successful years, gathering requirements, setting up the infrastructure and implementing the first pilot of the solution, the program was losing steam. The Finance IT Director in charge of the IT side was confronted with a challenge common to a lot of organizations:
The scarcity of dependable, qualified, Aptitude Software consultants trained to speed up the implementation, and meet his aggressive milestones considering the budgetary constraints.
Without prompt intervention and some radical out-of-the-box thinking, the program was under threat. FIIT Consulting, with its high quality of people and deeper and broader expertise, was in a very strong position to understand this challenge.
FIIT set out to address this head-on by ramping up our near-shore capabilities in Wroclaw, Poland and onboarding new consultants. The Aptitude Software consultants of FIIT Consulting brought unique expertise, not only on the technical side, where their combined 30 years of Aptitude implementation was allowed to shine but also on the functional aspects, strong from our daily involvement with key stakeholders over the course of 3 years spent on the program.
Leveraging this expertise, FIIT Consulting quickly ramped up those newly hired Aptitude Software consultants and managed to keep up with the growing demand the program placed on us, going from 3 consultants in 2018 to 14 in 2020.
Key project highlights
The mutual work not only empowered Finance IT to meet its milestones year after year, but having worked hand in hand with Project Leader to anticipate his resourcing needs, we ensured keeping a steady pipeline of trained consultants to grow together with Finance IT.
- data transport
- ultimate value management
- financial calculations
- IFRS 17
- Manual Entry Tool
- actuarial data store
- sub-ledger
But the work didn’t just end at implementing and supporting those applications: FIIT built robust solutions, supported by thorough Continuous Integration and Deployment Framework and Processes.
Apart from the mentioned above work, FIIT Consulting was also heavily involved in the Agile transformation of the whole Finance IT organization, helping to mould the very fabric of it, and laying the groundwork for a successful road to the future.
In all activities, from requirement gathering, specification & design of the solution, implementation, testing, roll-out, we brought our know-how and our enthusiasm on our way to become a respected partner and a key contributor to the success of the program. The outcome was a fully Agile Organization following the Spotify model. FIIT Consulting’s involvement in this Agile set-up was reflected in the presence of our consultants as scrum-masters, chapter leads and product owners.
