Infor: come together

By Laurie Iseman

“Statutory reporting is a key requirement and reports must be produced on an annual and three-yearly basis”
-Laurie Iseman

St Paul at Lloyd's chose Infor FMS SunSystems as Lloyd's financial management solution. As one of the largest managing agents at Lloyd's of London, they offer specialist underwriting in aviation, global property, marine and personal lines insurance. Their parent company, The St. Paul Companies Inc. founded in 1853 in Saint Paul, MN, has assets in excess of US$38 billion, and is rated 'AA' by Standard & Poor's. St. Paul at Lloyd's was created through the merger of three agencies; Cassidy Davis, Ashley Palmer, and Gravett & Tilling. Their fragmented financial systems were in need of consolidation. It involved the merging of all the financial software and data onto one central server running MS SQL Server on a Windows NT operating system. All three agencies were using Infor FMS SunSystems financial software, so the choice of SunSystems as the central financial management solution was a simple one.

Nigel Youngman, Agency Accountant and Purchase Ledger Manager of St. Paul at Lloyd's noted, "SunSystems is widely accepted as the industry standard in the insurance sector. That, coupled with the fact that three of our managing agents were very successfully working with the software, made the decision for us." The Group's financial system needed to retain a separate database for the corporate and syndicated constituents. The differences in each company's coding would make comparisons of data difficult; therefore a common chart of accounts was devised. The central service company's database would handle all supplier invoices and the processing and payment of employee expenses. These expenses would then be reclaimed from the syndicate and corporate entities' databases. St. Paul at Lloyd's were able to use SunSystems powerful transaction code architecture to ensure the same analysis could be conducted on any one of the databases. The process was simplified by enabling a macro to add these new and amended codes to the individual databases, so each syndicate and corporate entity could analyze the expenses allocated via the central service company individually. The central service company could analyze the expenses in total or on a company-by-company basis. Youngman says of the merger, "Using macros and the expertise of our consultant, Martin Royle, the process was fairly painless. SunSystems is strong at handling multiple company databases."

Statutory reporting is a key requirement and reports must be produced on an annual and three-yearly basis. St. Paul at Lloyd' implemented the Vision XL tool to report on the various syndicates and corporate.

Youngman states, "Easy access to the information held within the syndicate and corporate databases enabled us to quickly produce statutory reports such as the SQR Underwriting accounts and balance sheets. Vision XL can be used easily and quickly to extract this data, and allow Microsoft Excel functionality to manipulate and design the format of this information."

Another key function of the system was its ability to link into a range of additional applications. Youngman comments, "In addition to SunSystems, the finance department is regularly using Earnie Payroll Manager, an employee expense allocation system, and a budgeting model, the latter developed in Microsoft Access. SunSystems central database integrates seamlessly with these modules ensuring 100% accuracy of data, and saving time on rekeying data into each system."

The increasing complexity of the expense allocation model, and the need for a more sophisticated group expense reporting pack, prompted the addition of the Corporate Allocations module in 2001. This involved a two tier allocation process within the central service company, followed by transfer of relevant charges to target databases, while maintaining full intercompany accounting. Using the Corporate Allocations module St Paul at Lloyd's was able to produce a full expense reporting pack at group, department and individual entity level which was fully automated using a SunSystems macro.

Youngman adds, "The addition of this module has given the finance department the functionality to create a full set of control reports at each milestone in the process to confirm accurate allocation of the required expenses".

Laurie Iseman is Director of Marketing, Americas at Infor.