Background

The AIB SOX Team was tasked with determining and monitoring internal accounts to ensure compliance with agreed business process and SOX Audit standards implemented within the organisation.

AIB requested System Dynamics’ assistance in devising an efficient and effective managing compliance that would provide all the functionality of the legacy application, but could also be maintained directly by the users.  

Solution

Working within AIB’s architectural and business requirements, the solution we developed consisted of three main components:

• A J2EE Websphere-based front-end
• A SQL Server 2005 database back-end
• Integrated MIS

Data from the legacy system was converted and imported into the new solution to allow a like-with-like comparison. The solution was subjected to a rigorous quality assurance phase, consisting of unit, system and integration testing, user acceptance testing and full end-to-end production testing.

System Dynamics collaborated closely with AIB’s IT Department throughout the project lifecycle to ensure compliance with internal technical design and security standards.  

Benefits

The new system allows: 

• Business-critical processing to take place without the need for a full-time IT resource to maintain and administer the application.
• Business processes to be streamlined; end users can obtain required data directly from the reporting component of the solution.
• Improved management reporting, especially in the area of trend analysis, which removes the dependency on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks associated with the previous system.
• A quality user interface ensuring the solution is highly usable, thereby reducing the overall training time for end-users.
• Resource Capacity to be greatly improved e.g., the twice yearly import of financial data, which was a two-week full-time task for an IT resource working alongside the business, was reduced to a ten minute task for a single business user.