Hyperion Financial Management - Requirements Workshop

Namaste!

I am writing a series of blogs on consolidation project phases, like., requirements gathering, analysis and solution design processes.

As part of the Consolidation application software development life cycle (SDLC), many of us wonder how to start and where to start? I am not really going to get into the project management side of the things since it is all together a different subject, reserve it for another day!

At very beginning of the project once "project charter" is signed, Project manager (PM)  would bring in Solution Architect (SA) and Business analyst (BA) team into project engagement. PM and BA would start socialize with the required stake holders such as Finance Directors/Managers, Statutory Reporting Managers, Controllers and other Finance subject matter experts (SME). 

In Parallel, Solution Architect(SA) try to understand the overall technical environment such as data sources  (GL modules, 3rd party data sources, offline excel feeds, etc),  along with potential Hardware and Software Sizing models.

Implementation Project Manager (PM) along with Business Analyst (BA) would schedule to conduct several requirements gathering workshops. On very first day, it is very important to ask some high level questions to understand the current financial consolidation and reporting landscape.

It would be very important to get a grasp on "AS-IS" state before designing the "TO-BE" state for financial consolidation and reporting solution.

Here are some high level questions to be asked during the requirement workshop. I would encourage an interactive discussion as extent as possible.

1.   Please explain the current consolidation close cycle.

2.   How many users do you anticipate using the system?

3.   What are some of the key business process issues you are trying to address?

      Inter company transactions 

      Foreign Exchange and Cash flow 

      Prior Period Adjustments 

      Any bottle necks in the current consolidation process 

      External Reporting 

4.   How many Legal Entities and Reporting Chart of Accounts?

Note:

In case of redundant GL accounts, it is a best practice to design and improve the processes to standardize the COA. From experience, it was determined that lack of standardization of COA was a major bottleneck to achieve the single source of truth.

5.   Do you anticipate having consolidation application built using GL Accounts or Summary Accounts level?

 6.   Will you be using multiple currencies?

7.   Please explain any custom Inter company elimination requirements or is it standard eliminations?

8.   Can you please explain about requirement of Minority Interest calculation?

9.   How often will data be refreshed? Daily or monthly

10.Do you anticipate Master data management issues? If so, do you have an anticipated plan to deal with these?

11.How many reports do you anticipate will need to be generated?

Sample Reports:

·       P&L by legal entity

·       Balance sheet by legal entity and segment

·       Cash Flow by legal entity and segment

·       Trend reports for P&L and Balance Sheet (i.e. monthly / quarterly)

12.Do you generate a “standard” management reporting book? How often?

13.Are you planning to include Income Statement, Balance sheet and or cash flow reporting? At what level? (Corporate only, company code, Cost Centre). Briefly Explain.

14.Do you plan to do allocations? Briefly explain the complexity.

15.Briefly explain about currency translation requirements

16.What do you anticipate for Training requirements? Training course for all, train-the-trainer, etc.

17.What are your documentation requirements?

a.Technical and system related documentation requirements?

b.Documentation for system administrators?

After gathering the responses for all above questions, BA and SA along with PM will have to analyze along with any supporting documentation from client repository to move on the next phase of creating the "Business Requirements Document (BRD)".

I will continue to write about next steps of the project life cycle in future blogs.

I have published an Advanced courses on Hyperion Essbase, Planning and HFM on Thinkific Learning Platform. Please apply the coupon codes found on the site. Please check it out if you are interested. 

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