Case Study - Royal College of Midwives

We started working with Royal College of Midwives (RCM) back in December 2021, after one of our software partners Xledger reached out to see if we could assist RCM. We would be providing technical resource on the client side to enable them to successfully transition to their new system and eventually take on the role of the software provider in carrying out the implementation, data migration and client training and support. Royal College of Midwives is the only UK based professional organisation and trade union dedicated to serving midwifery and the whole midwifery team. The RCM represents the interests of midwives in all four UK countries individually and collectively. They strive to promote excellence, innovation and leadership in the care of childbearing women, newborns and their families, nationally and internationally.

Their mission is to enhance the confidence, professional practice and influence of midwives for the benefit of childbearing women and their families. The RCM strive to operate with integrity, act in an open and transparent way, be accessible to members and support equity in service.

Situational Analysis

When the RCM was looking to change their system, they identified some key requirements for their ideal solution to meet. The RCM is a multi-entity organisation, so it was vital that their new system would allow them to easily consolidate their accounts. They were also seeking a system that natively provided tools to produce much more detailed and sophisticated reporting. They needed functionality to easily slice multi-dimensional data as needed and be able to present this in engaging ways to budget holders and other stakeholders around the business.

A key driver for this project, was to replace the existing system ‘Soprano’ that was managing procurement, purchase invoicing, expenses and credit cards, which was being deprecated, Sage 50 which handled their bookkeeping processes, and a plethora of Excel supporting schedules maintaining external journals and adjustments for branch expenses around the UK.

This set-up was completely inefficient, required significant staff time to produce useful financial reports across the business, and created significant risk of human error and increased audit time and cost. It also lacked a sufficiently powerful reporting module or the ability to consolidate financial data across all the entities within the organisation which were two of the key needs identified by RCM to reduce pain points within the business.

System Recommendations 

The RCM was looking into multiple different systems in the initial phase of the project before our involvement with them, and made the decision to implement Xlegder as this offered a complete ERP solution which met all requirements natively without the need to look at other supplementary systems and/or apps and Excel workings/schedules to deliver the results RCM were after.

Implementation

From kick-off to go-live, the Royal College of Midwives implementation project took place over a 15-month period. The project’s initial estimated duration was three months.  When an implementation process lasts for more than a year, a business will usually have faced challenges around resourcing commitments dedicated to the project vs. having to attend to day to day operational and audit duties, as well as internal resistance from key staff members to embracing the change of system. This was a key theme as to why the project went through three management processes to postpone go-live, and ultimately why Xledger approached us to provide the RCM with additional support to get this project successfully over the line.

One of the challenges that arose during the implementation phase was that there was no one-version of the truth across historic data, this having been maintained across multiple systems and Excel schedules, and therefore the action of migrating historic data was fully dependent on the business making a decision as to which information and/or data set must be used to migrate into the new system. Ultimately management accounts were used which were more difficult to map into the new structure than a standard trial balance report format exported from the previous finance system. Despite this the 4PointZero project team was able to build reporting structures that had the functionality to support fund accounting and SOFA reporting, which were key objective for the RCM. The new reporting structure also allowed for the project team to create ready to use reports for the budget holders and finance team, which was another priority for this project.

Another challenge that the project team faced in the implementation process was around the CRM integration. In the initial phase of the implementation, we uncovered inconsistencies between the data held in the third-party system and the accounting records, and subsequently, made recommendations to the client around additional processes they could introduce to improve the accuracy of the data to move forward with an integration.

Training

During the initial project period both the Xledger team and our consultants hosted system training workshops via Microsoft Teams, eventually transitioning to only being delivered by our consultants in the latter stages of the project. These were recorded and sent out to the RCM team for future reference.  The training has helped to instil knowledge on relevant areas of the system, as well as developing strong internal processes and controls within the RCM finance team to ensure the system is used efficiently and effectively. We continue to support and upskill the RCM staff team on an on-going basis to ensure that their processes and use of the system continue to evolve and enable the business to achieve its growth strategy.

Project Outcomes

The successful implementation of  Xledger allowed the RCM to achieve the key deliverables identified during the project scoping process and they are now able to access financial information much more easily, with the system producing reports designed specifically for the client's needs, including automated consolidations across all entities of the RCM and multi-dimensional reporting.

The fact all data is now processed and contained within a single system has also led to the client having more faith in the accuracy of their financial reporting whilst also reducing their spend on systems and hardware. They will also see a reduced audit fee given this should be a much smoother process testing data and controls within Xledger rather than across multiple systems and Excel files.

The extensive support provided by the project team, particularly focusing on training and advisory around implementing better processes and controls within the finance team has enabled the business to have Real-Time visibility of their performance and numbers, whilst keeping their finance team lean and staffing costs low despite being able to improve the quality, timeliness and usefulness of financial reporting.

Final Note

Whilst the project had its challenges it has been great working with Xledger and getting the RCM settled into their new system. We look forward to continuing working with both Xledger and the Royal College of Midwives!