WPP is the world’s largest advertising company by revenue, employing around 190,000 people in 3,000 offices across 112 countries. It owns a number of advertising, public relations and market research networks, including IMRB, Millward Brown, Grey, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, TNS, Young & Rubicam and Cohn & Wolfe.

The challenge:

SystemsAccountants were engaged by WPP’s BPO Director, to provide interim ERP and Financial Process consultants to an initiative to migrate the US Finance operations of WPP’s healthcare agencies on to a single ERP platform in a Finance Shared Service Centre. WPP subsidiary, Ogilvy CommonHealth, had an established JD Edwards platform and this was selected as the common ERP.

The solution:

We were initially tasked to provide a Technical JD Edwards Lead to project manage and execute all technical data migration and integration of Grey Healthcare’s legacy systems onto Ogilvy’s JD Edwards platform. Separately we were engaged to provide a specialist JDE Functional Project Manager to lead the functional integration of another WPP agency, Sudler. The mandate was to run all aspects of finance function integration as well as data conversion and migration efforts for, Sudler’s, financial applications onto the Ogilvy platform.

The outcome:

The client had opted not to engage the services of a large consulting firm for what they deemed a discrete project; however, they did recognise the need to bring in specialist Financial Systems skills, to supplement their internal teams and to enable them to deliver the projects swiftly and to budget.

SystemsAccountants’ Interim ERP Practice caters specifically to this need. We maintain a deep and extensive network of world class ERP Consultants, Project/Program Managers and Architects, whom we continually talk to and meet with, to ensure our clients can tap into a live and engaged pool of talent.

Our flexible fee structure extends to our search and interim consulting services.