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Phase II (Sep 93 - Mar 94): Financial Accounts investigation

'Now what we've also got to do is add a financial dimension to the system, it just does underwriting and claims at the moment. ...

You can record premiums, you can record whether they've been paid - it's very basic - all you can say is whether it's outstanding or paid, that's the only form of accounting. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky because at the moment all the accounting is done at the main frames as you can imagine and that's not too bad, both systems work OK and my view is that as far as accounting in a particular country is concerned we shouldn't be trying to build an accounts system to do all what the mainframe does, because that's a massive job.

... I think that you've got to get your priorities right here you know, and I don't think that that [replacing the mainframe] is a viable option at the minute. Maybe longer term. But I mean, X has got to prove itself as a company, if X doesn't make ... money over the next few years X-Group will get shut of it, it's as simple as that so there's no point spending an age trying to build an accounts system now so you can replace a mainframe system in the UK and US when the one that's there works perfectly adequately. For collecting premiums and settling claims the mainframes are fine so my view is leave them there for now and lets concentrate on more important things. I mean the money X would save by not using XUK main frames OK, they get charged 1.2 million a year or something for using the UK's main frame system but that's funny money, it's internal money, it's not real money ...

So let's really concentrate on what's important which is them getting the information to manage their business and providing a better service to the client. And that's what this is all about really. I think it's always important to try and keep those objectives in mind really because otherwise you can start thinking it would be really nice if we dispense with the US main frame system, but what's the point?...

So, ... there are two ways we can actually help. This business of when a premium is paid in America and that's on a UK policy, rather than all of the kind of laborious manual, form filling and the processes that are involved at the moment that could be down loaded from the US main frame, picked up on our database in the US and then back to the UK over the link, equally if it's a claim the claim can come the same way, the process for that is in place already and the re-insurance recovery can be made. And so ... we can make a contribution to improving financial control between the X territories by improving the speed of reporting, hopefully the accuracy and cutting out some of the duplication of effort. So we can certainly do that in the UK and the US, anywhere where you've got it on tap.

Now the other point, this is a strategic issue really, is what do X want to do in Europe. At the moment X has a different system in every European country it operates in. ... I can put the Multinational system in every country but they can't use it to run the business.. they can't get rid of their existing system and just use the Multinational system because there's no accounts module so they can't, ... pay claims cheques and this kind of thing if they were to get rid of their existing system. Now I have a feeling that we could take a package, an off the shelf creditors/debtors package, accounts received /accounts payable call it what you want, and with some kind of an interface to the Multinational system we could do most of what's needed on the accounting side and there's a package that's used within the group called Sun Account and there's a French version of it and a German version of it and I think that we could take that and develop the next phase between the Multinational system and that package and then have a solution that you could potentially drop into any European country. ...

So what is happening at the moment is there is an analysis exercise taking place to look at this whole area of finance, looking at all the various things I've just mentioned ... and that will determine how we approach implementation of the system in other X countries.'

X013 page 026.02 (tape 04.2.04) Gordan Notes/Trans/Tape 30/09/93

Social influence: Organisation: Physical
Technical influence: Tasks: Requirements definition


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