OREANDA-NEWS. On April 23, 2007 IBS, the leader in the Russian market of consulting services and information technologies, completed developing methodological materials for management accounting and began deployment of an automated accounting system for MIEL, the country's largest investment-and-development Company, reported the press-centre of  IBS. Improvement of MIEL's finance management system began in April, 2006. The project was caused by a need to centralize and structure managerial processes, and became a part of a package project aimed to reorganize the system of governance in this holding Company and make it efficient and transparent.


The project's primary objective is to structure the accounting system at all divisions, consolidate accounting and reporting standards across the Company and automate the related processes, adopt international standards of financial accounting, which will ensure transparency and reliability of accounting, and help avoid duplicating information and double input of data. IBS beat the competition and with its significant expertise in developing and automating systems for governing financial and economic processes in the Russian market was chosen to implement the project launched in spring of 2006.


"When choosing consultants we focused on their ability to offer comprehensive solutions to our tasks: to develop a methodological basis and deploy an automated system. IBS experts helped us to develop a methodology for management accounting and at present they're setting up the information system. The project coincided with serious organizational changes in the Company, which complicated the project on the one hand, yet, on the other hand, it removed obstacles to creation of an efficient system, provided new possibilities and allowed us to climb out of the rut and enabled the Company to use new accounting principles. We expect the system currently being designed to significantly improve the Company's governance due to transparent and prompt managerial accounting," observes Yevgeny Plaxenkov, Financial Director, MIEL.


At the first phase of the project IBS consultants inspected the current system of management accounting and reporting. They analysed the Company’s business processes in all of its activities, offered ways for improving the current system of management accounting and defined the Customer’s requirements for the future system. The inspection revealed basic differencies between current methods of management accounting and reporting formats, peculiarities in accounting for different types of business, and possibilities for standardazation of the accounting system. Then, IBS consultants developed uniform corporate standards for management accounting based on IAS principles. At present IBS is setting up an automated system for financial management based on the developed methodological materials. The analysis jointly carried out by the Customer and IBS consultants helped them choose the Microsoft Dynamics AX product as the system's software platform, as its functionality meets needs of MIEL in the best way.


“Deployment of an automated system for financial management was a lucky coincidence with the Company developing its new Concept for Building a Corporate Information System (CIS). This will ensure full integration of the automated system into the overall software/hardware architecture of CIS and will facilitate efficient implementation of the idea of a uniform information environment in the Company,” says Sergey Zakhartsev, IT Director, MIEL.There are plans to deliver the system for automating the management accounting in January, 2008. The system must also take care of financial analysis and generation of reports, and have a function for inputting and storing budgeted and actual costs in cash and quantitative items displayed in appropriate analytical charts. The number of users should exceed 200.