Dmitry Makeev: The management reporting for holding - MDM is necessary

: Dmitry, tell, please, about premises of this project?

Dmitry Makeev: Need of automation of process of collecting of actual data on income and expenses in Sitronics company arose for a long time. Historically data in the company gathered and came down manually, however their quality and the detail level did not meet expectations. To look at revenue on a business unit, for example, by contracts, it was necessary to request information from the child organizations owing to what a lot of time for data processing left, according to the standards adopted in management company. However the data required for the reporting already existed in the accounting systems of the company that was a push to a project startup on automation of an information collection system.

TAdviser: What systems were data sources for a new MDM system?

Dmitry Makeev: The companies of the Sitronics group use the internal reference books. As a rule, it is reference books by employees, partners, the nomenclature of products, the chart of accounts and so forth contents and which appointment is often identical. Due to the need of repeated input of identical information and further directory synchronization in Sitronics it was necessary to process a large number of information manually for different divisions of the company – from finance division to production. The lack of regulations of support of reference books led to decline in quality of the stored information.

TAdviser: How did you solve this problem?

Dmitry Makeev: In our case was to provide enough automated collecting of actual data on group that in itself rather simple task, and we tried to implement it by own forces. However there were difficulties with comparison of data from different sources. We understood that not to do without serious work on a regulation of maintaining reference books, development of methodology of data collection and implementation of a centralized system of MDM.

Besides, along with traditional tasks of collecting of the reporting, in the company there was also other initiative requiring existence of a system of maintaining the normative reference information (NRI) – project accounting on Sitronics group. Introduction of project accounting allowed to increase quality and depth of management accounting for the purpose of providing the business customer with important information. Thus, in Sitronics it was decided to create a MDM system.

TAdviser: How solution specifications and how you selected the contractor on the project were formulated?

Dmitry Makeev: Solution specifications and to the contractor were rather tough as the system of maintaining NSI and collecting of the reporting creates a common information space for systems, provides the high level of accuracy of the data and reference books. The open competition on delivery and implementation of a corporate system of MDM was announced. Sitronics IT became the only integrator which conformed to requirements of the customer. Specialists Sitronics IT proposed system implementation of NSI on the basis of Oracle Data Relationship Management (Oracle DRM).

When before us there was a task to select the suitable solution for process automation of management of the normative reference information, it turned out that in the market there are not a lot of ready universal MDM solutions. Generally the systems of the class MDM are intended for a certain data domain, other systems are a part of heavy ERP systems, the third – development for the specific customer. The Oracle DRM system was the universal solution which exceeded competitors by criteria, significant for us, at the same time was competitive at the price

TAdviser: Dmitry, tell, please, in more detail about the project course.

Dmitry Makeev: The project on system implementation of MDM in Sitronics started in August, 2010, by January, 2011 the main methodology – a unified plan of accounts, rules of project accounting was developed. All reference books which were supposed to be kept within the implemented system were separated into two groups – centralized for management company and decentralized which are concentrated in subsidiary companies. An example of the centralized reference book is the chart of accounts, decentralized – contracts.

Important point for any MDM system is maintaining "mepping" – comparisons from reference books of external systems to the centralized reference books of a system. Two options of maintaining "mepping" are possible – it is centralized in service NSI and decentralized in each company. The first option requires creation in management company of rather big division, the second – distributes load on maintaining "mepping" of subsidiary companies. We selected the second option as more suitable in terms of cost.

In December, 2010 specialists Sitronics IT started system implementation. From the moment of the beginning of works before transition to trial operation there passed 5 months. During the project ETL infrastructure which allowed to synchronize changes in reference books of the accounting systems on all group "Sitronics" with the central directory of master data was developed and to perform the return publication in the reference books which are kept on a centralized basis in management company. Also during the project multilevel process of approval of changes for one of often changeable centralized reference books was configured. It should be noted that in case of change of methodology, attributive structure of the existing reference books or adding new a system can be finished by forces of IT support of the customer.

TAdviser: What in your opinion became the main result of creation of a MDM system in the company? How do you estimate effect of use of a system?

Dmitry Makeev: Thanks to emergence system implementation of collecting and data analysis (BI) passed in a project deliverable of MDM of the checked analytical reference books rapidly – 2.5 months. As a result since August, 2011 and till present in JSC Sitronics the automated collection of data on expenses and income on all group is performed, at the same time a system works in the mode of commercial operation.

The quality of system implementation can be estimated by different parameters. If to estimate financial criteria, then one of key is the cost of support of the implemented system. In our case support is performed by one employee for 30% of employment a month that it is a little for the systems of such scale. If to speak about business criteria, then to the forefront there is a qualitative index - it is the trust level to data, their availability and convenience of the interface to users of a system. And, it is necessary to tell, the level of satisfaction of the business customer is quite high.