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Challenge
Financial services, accounting, technology and related industries rely on SourceMedia for market information—including news, analysis and insight—that it provides to 750,000 worldwide clients and subscribers through publications, industry-standard applications, seminars and conferences. Its publications include such pre-eminent information sources as American Banker, National Mortgage News, The Bond Buyer and Accounting Today. SourceMedia’s 1,000 employees are headquartered in New York City, and the company maintains offices as well in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and London.
In late 2004, parent-company Thomson Corporation sold SourceMedia to Investcorp, a global investment group. Without the corporate shared service capabilities to which it once had access through Thomson, SourceMedia now needed to establish its own separate accounting system and human resources information system (HRIS). These business systems had required extensive customization when supporting a corporate enterprise and previously had been based on PeopleSoft applications for accounting, financial reporting and human resources. SourceMedia considered converting to its own PeopleSoft system, but as it began to put together a transition plan, it quickly discovered this solution was not feasible. The costs of upgrading to the new software version the company required, the expenses of customization, along with budgets required for user licenses, implementation, services and annual maintenance fees were far beyond what SourceMedia was willing to fund in its new status.
Solution
To analyze its situation and recommend a better solution, SourceMedia called on New York-based Cipher Dynamic, a global Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. As a much better fit for the new-sized organization, Cipher Dynamics recommended implementation of Microsoft Dynamics GP 8.0, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Windows SharePoint Portal and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on which to run the Dynamics- GP solution. With Cipher Dynamics' meeting a very aggressive timeline required for the transition period, SourceMedia’s accounting department was up and running in just four months, with a one-month parallel run.
While outsourcing its HRIS function, SourceMedia is planning to consolidate multiple billing systems onto its new Dynamics GP platform. The project will begin by moving SourceMedia’s Web-seminar order entry and billing onto Dynamics GP. Subsequently the company will start consolidating its existing billing systems onto Dynamics GP, along with sales-order processing, accounts receivable and Cipher Dynamics’ PubSuite module for media companies that integrates directly with Dynamics GP.
Result
Now totally independent of Thomson Corporation and the services, business systems and infrastructure it had previously shared, SourceMedia employed its Microsoft solutions to automate processes, improve workflows and implement controls that made the use of SourceMedia’s best practices and business requirements easier and more consistent.
“We are using six or seven accounts-receivable systems that we plan to migrate into Microsoft Dynamics GP over the next two years,” says Vice President of Technology Ivan Latanision. “We’re supporting the Dynamics GP system with just one person.” Latanision estimates his company saved $600,000 to $1 million by switching to Microsoft technology, rather than trying to replicate the PeopleSoft system it had shared with its previous parent company.
With Dynamics-GP, SourceMedia has access to reporting tools that it did not have before. “We can easily develop our own reports internally now,” Latanision says.
Latanision says he finds the biggest benefit from Dynamics- GP, however, to be its ERP capabilities. “We will use it as our core piece of infrastructure for accounts receivable, sales-order processing, professional services consulting billing, time-and-materials billing and our collections group. We have one system for advertising billing, two for subscription billing, one for events billing—none is integrated with the others. In some cases now we can replace the entire system, and in others we will just bring in the accounts-receivable component to Dynamics GP. Down the road we can give customers access to a customer service portal to update account information and check on the status of their accounts using SharePoint. That’s been impossible with our existing systems.”
“We’re largely a print-based business,” Latanision points out, “but we’re moving online to better serve the needs of our customers and to maintain our competitive edge. Our previous systems weren’t flexible enough to support the variety of online business models we’ll need to provide. We want to offer new products, or bundles of products that historically have been billed out of different systems for subscriptions, advertising and events. If someone wants to buy a product that consists of items that are billed out of three different systems, it has been a real challenge for us. With one consolidated system, in Microsoft Dynamics GP, we can handle it more efficiently.”
Microsoft Dynamics GP will play a significant role in SourceMedia’s business intelligence initiatives, Latanision says. “It will be the single record of truth for all of our customers, orders, and product-related transactions.”
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