Case Study 4. Direct-Effect

Case Study 5

The company was a £15m turnover publishing company experiencing phenomenal growth of 40% year on year. This rapid growth had led to a proliferation of systems to cope with specific needs, resulting in re-keying essentially the same information several times into various spreadsheets and then having to reconcile the various versions of the information to ensure consistency. The accounting software was also stretched to breaking point and was being used in a non-standard way to enable the developing needs to be accommodated, and this also was resulting in time-consuming processes for both data entry and reporting. Meanwhile, the staff including the Finance Manager were so busy trying to keep on top of all these systems that there was no time to take a step back and plan for a better way of doing things. Indeed, with each passing month, they were getting further behind, and when Diana arrived, management accounts had not been produced for the previous 6 months. With the rapid growth expected to continue, it was vital to come up with solutions that would work in the longer term and cope with ever increasing volumes of data, as well as provide much needed timely information about how the company was performing.

Within a month, Diana had designed and implemented an Access database to capture the details of all sales orders, as well as to provide the key reports required to measure sales performance and to calculate sales incentive payments for staff. By the end of the second month, an order had been placed for a suite of Exchequer accounts software modules, to replace the main accounting software. The new accounts system was able to 'go live' in time for the new financial year, just 4 months after Diana's arrival, with a complex payroll system (needed to cope with various incentive payments to sales staff that needed to be allocated to specific projects within job costing) coming on live in time for the following tax year in April.

Meanwhile, Diana developed tools to calculate remuneration packages for sales staff, so that the CEO and director could understand the impact on employee earnings based on various levels of performance. With the cost of sales staff being the major cost of each project, this was a fundamental element of planning for the future more effectively.

Diana then wrote a functional specification for the next stage of development, so that calculation of gross pay for the sales staff could be automated.