Mondial is primarily into IT consulting with a focus on software advisory services, process consulting, and implementation services. Interestingly, this was the first implementation done by Mondial in the infrastructure sector and the first project done in collaboration with MAIA.

When Alok Jajodia, promoter director of Mondial IT Consultants signed the deal, he knew it was going to be tough. They had the mammoth task of consolidating the entire financial data of IRB Infrastructure Developers, which had more than 15 accounting entities created as separate companies in Tally. Cracking into a closed system like Tally and consolidating the data was a challenge in itself. Moreover, Mondial had to track the finance across all the entities that had accounts with multiple banks.

It was undoubtedly a testing project for the team in Mondial. But what would surprise all of us even more is the fact that, among all these challenges, Mondial up-sold! Instead of merely selling a financial consolidation solution to IRB, Mondial convinced them about the advantages of having the capability to ‘analyze’ the consolidated data. A convinced client implemented a business intelligence solution, leading to what can be called as ‘one of the few BI implementations in the infrastructure space’ in the country.

A Brilliant Move
Mumbai-based Mondial is primarily into IT consulting with a focus on software advisory services, process consulting, and implementation services. Interestingly, this was the first implementation done by Mondial in the infrastructure sector and also the first project done in collaboration with MAIA Intelligence, the vendor of the financial consolidation and BI solutions implemented at IRB. Mondial’s expertise in finance consolidation and IT consultancy helped them in not only getting the deal but also in understanding the various pain areas of IRB. The key promoters of Mondial are Chartered Accountants and the solution provider was thus considered as the ‘preferred choice’ both by MAIA and IRB.

“We were first timers in many aspects. Though we have dealt with various types of customers, an infrastructure company was a new-fangled experience. Not to mention, the BI solution of MAIA in itself was something close to ‘unknown’ for us. But when we studied the entire environment, we realized that there is scope for us to sell them a solution that would help them take business decisions more effectively. So, we didn’t have to think twice before introducing a BI solution to them,” says Jajodia.

Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence says, “Mondial possesses a rare combination — understanding of both IT and finance. That’s why they were able to up-sell the BI solution apart from consolidating the entire data faultlessly. Anybody else would have restricted to deploying a financial consolidation solution.”

Madhav H Kale, Group CFO of IRB was definitely aware of the importance of analytics in his business, but the team was not able to do much because the data itself was not standardized in the first place. Using Excel sheets, IRB was doing limited amount of analysis. Mondial’s first task was to present them the benefits of deploying a financial consolidation solution on a BI platform. The team from Mondial gave a ‘proof of concept’ to IRB by pulling out a sample data and importing it to the solution and finally producing the report. The difference between using an excel sheet and a BI solution for analytics was, without much ado, accepted by the client. IRB was also taken to one of MAIA’s customer’s site who had implemented a BI solution. Thus, Mondial, which had never done any BI implementations, took the challenge of consolidating the company’s entire financial data on a sophisticated BI platform.

Integration-a Challenge
As expected, it was not an easy task for Mondial to merge the data of IRB. The very structure of IRB was one of the biggest challenges for Mondial. IRB Infrastructure undertakes development of various infrastructure projects in the road sector. Each project is treated as a different legal entity for better control process, cost elements, and for other accounting procedures.

The company was depending largely on Tally and Excel to capture the data. It was becoming increasingly difficult for IRB to prepare the quarterly financial statements as the financial data was scattered across many places. “The accountants and financial officers were facing increasing pressure with regard to financial consolidation of accounts based on companies, business areas, profit centers, divisions or branches, or the SBUs. The statutory consolidation reporting, which required the reported data to be aggregated into consolidated financial statements on a quarterly basis, was becoming a challenge,” says Kale of IRB. IRB was using Excel sheets for extracting the Trail Balance information from Tally for various legal entities and finding out common transactions in the same share holding pattern. This was taking a lot of time and also required high involvement of skilled and senior team.

It was a pain for Mondial in the initial phase to map the chart of accounts. Same accounts had multiple names in various sheets. Mondial had to pay high attention to each of these accounts so that mapping is completely error free. Even a minor mistake would have made the entire exercise pointless. However, Mondial managed to speed up the effort by working in collaboration with teams from IRB and MAIA.

After mapping the data, it was necessary to export data to the Financial Consolidation management (FCM) solution. Since Tally is a proprietary software, Mondial had to use a ‘Tally connector’ that converts the data into an SQL table and then import it in to the FCM solution. Since Mondial was not completely aware of the intricacies of the BI solution, a team from MAIA worked hand-in-hand with them. “I would say it was a collaborative effort of the teams of Mondial, IRB and MAIA,” says Jajodia.

Looming Benefits

Looming Benefits

Started in September 2008, Mondial has successfully completed the consolidation of IRB’s financial data across multiple legal entities and branches and is now helping IRB to prepare the December 2008 quarterly reports with the help of FCM tool and the BI solution. “We have successfully generated the reports of March and September 2008 and the December reports will be out shortly. After that, IRB will take over the entire process single handedly,” says Jajodia.

Since the team from IRB has been working in tandem with Mondial right from the beginning, Mondial expects a smooth change-over. In any case, Mondial assures the availability of its team for any type of trouble-shooting.

After the consolidation of data and implementation of the BI solution, IRB has started seeing results and is able to generate financial reports just in three days whereas earlier it used to take almost 15 days. But now, IRB can analyze the data in a better way. It can easily examine cost distributions, balancing, and adjustment of priced item rates. BI also helps them view the impact of discounts and adjustments on the final contract price. Financial statements, ratio analysis, notes, etc, are generated successfully in less time.

Key stake holders of IRB will be able to access data in an analyzable format from different companies maintained in Tally at different locations, providing them the ability to evaluate information on a regular basis. The BI solution also has the option to connect with other enterprise applications like ERP and CRM that IRB may integrate in future. “Running a successful enterprise requires the ability to track, manage, analyze, and report on an enormously complex mix of operational data. The new solutions help them do just that,” explains Jajodia.

It was a learning experience for Mondial. It gave them the exposure to a new domain like infrastructure along with the experience of implementing a BI solution. “At the end of it, we not only proved our competence but we also got to learn many things. One the one hand, we learnt how to work under high pressure and, on the other hand, it made us realize ‘nothing is impossible’,” concludes Jajodia.