Project Accounting

Jagannathan Viswanathan

Global experience in more than half a dozen full life cycle Oracle Application rollouts/upgrades over 14 yrs.

Rich and varied experience functional experience of 25 years in SDLC, MIS, accounts, business operations and financial planning.

Project Management and Cross Functional Consultant on the following Oracle Financials Modules (Project Accounting, Project Manufacturing, iProcurement, PO, Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, General Ledger, Cash Management, Fixed Assets).

Experience with Project Accounting related and other Bolt on applications such as Maximo, EMPAC, MS Projects, ABT, XRT

Extremely strong skill in developing business and IS strategies required for business process reengineering, These strategies include but are not restricted to the use of a standard engagement model and SDLC to establish business requirements that can be mapped to the Oracle E-Business suite.

11i Implementations using versatile full in house SDLC and PMO toolkits R2I ( Bearingpoint) and PMM 6.0 (GE) methodologies that start from Definition of Scope to the Measurement and Control of the solution delivered.

Used features of external methodologies such as AIM (Oracle) in most implementations and CMM/SEI in implementations at AT&T and Motorola.

Strong skills and expertise in the area of Requirement gathering and Fit/Gap Analysis followed by alternative development, scoping and costing.

Used AIM ( BP 80) or SDLC driven process methodologies to define as-is and to-be business processes.

Attended high level courses on Rational based modeling tools (HL7) for supporting Oracle’s Healthcare Transaction Base messaging transactions.

Self taught in other modeling tools such as UML.

Identified test cases and scenarios to drive the details of AIM Functional and Technical specifications for extensions to Oracle Applications such as Accounting Realignment at the Department of HHS, Prior Year Adjustments at Department of VA and Endowments at the Stanford University.

Developed end to end regression tests for CRP (Conference Room Pilot), SIT (System Integration Testing) and UAT (User Acceptance Testing).

Provided Post Implementation Support including Month End and Year End closes, Audit and Analysis, Knowledge acquisition etc.

Excellent written and Oral Skills with a strong ability for direct interaction with CFO’s to identify requirements for financial systems and indirect remote interaction with offshore development and support teams.

SKILLS

Technical Environments

Operating Systems: UNIX, DOS, Windows 95, 98 and Windows NT, Oracle PL/SQL and Oracle Workflow

Oracle Applications

Oracle Application Release 11i( Iprocurement, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Inventory, Order Management, Inventory, Project Manufacturing including EAM, Project Accounting, Fixed Assets)- Both Federal vertical and Commercial

Procure to Pay and Order to Cash Cycles and related accounting

Oracle R12 upgrade including major SLA customizations in AP, PA and Payroll

Other Applications

Other Applications: MS Visio, HL7, MS Projects, ABT, Markview 170 Systems

Design Methodology

AIM, PMM (Project Management Methodology), CMM/SEI

EXPERIENCE

Rolta International Inc. September-2013 to Now

Senior Management Consultant

September 2013 to Now (Memphis Light and Gas Works

Entered the project during CRP2 where the core module for implementation was EAM with the option to account for all Inventory in Projects Accounting. As lead of the Projects accounting module, rapidly redesigned the projects infrastructure to include Work Order type based Projects and Tasks and Administrative Projects and Tasks. Built the entire projects auto accounting structure and code to handle WIP, Inventory including divisional (Electric, Gas or Water) accounting on the common project and WIP projects. Cost management SLA was customized to handle receiving inspection on receipt into receiving inspection and delivery to expense to be based on division and driven by the division on the accrual account. The AP and PO account generation for all three destination types was customized to derive the right division based on either destination type (Shop Floor is driven by task organization of project associated with WO and Inventory by cost category set associated with item) and expenditure type for destination type Expense (always a common division). These set of changes allow proper valuation of inventory and WIP by division. PO’s for destination type shop floor use purchasing category association to expenditure types. The entire design was presented to the senior finance team and the CIO.

Supported the building of interfaces to the property management application (Powerplan) to take all EAM costs accounted for in a generic WIP valuation account and split to Construction WIP and/or replacement WIP and burden them. Both split and burden costs flow back to projects as unaccounted net zero and accounted non next aero transactions respectively. Helped design the building of an interface from Hyperion to Projects for booking negative costs to projects for customer contributions as accounted transactions. These are then used by Powerplan for proper splitting and burdening derivations. Both systems send back costs as miscellaneous transactions.

A custom solution consisting of a form that mapped expenditure organization and expenditure type to a natural account (FERC) and split it from the common division to target electric, gas and water divisions by percentage was built. A custom program was written to take such expenditures on the common division and send them to GL via the manual SLA journal creation API of the financial accounting hub using the divisions, FERCs and percentages in the form. The expenditure types and split percentages has considerably condensed the existing similar charge code based derivation of FERC’s. Recently extended the derivation to complex credit card accounting in the company paid scenario

An additional custom interface for booking all customer revenues as negative miscellaneous expenditures for proper budgeting and generation of inter company accounts from a daily file from the mainframe system has been designed. Also involved in a major customization that would allow the automatic derivation of projects and tasks to be created and associated with EAM WO’s using the WO type based project structure.

A trigger on the projects open interface has been built so support proper expenditure organization and type derivation in cases where EAM defaults do not support the business practice or accounting by area (expenditure organization).

Participated in design of a custom OTL/Payroll interface so actual labor costs could flow to EAM for time related to WO’s and Projects for EAM and administrative time as there is no out of the box solution to meet MLGW needs. Proposed and proofed the use of transaction controls to avoid double counting EAM costs in projects.

All the above were documented, developed and tested on dozens of complex accounting scenarios in four year period over multiple prolonged testing cycles and the project is on track to go live on June-1-2017.

Based on all the above work I was awarded the employee of the month award in Feb-2014 and then nominated again in June-2015

Helix Energy Solutions Group November 2007 to September 2013

Applications Manager for Project Accounting

November 2007 to September 2013 (Helix Energy Solutions Group )

Initially supported the rollout of an integrated Project Accounting solution ( including Payroll, AR, FA, GL and Supply Chain) for the US companies including conversions and post go live month end close support through several cycles Since February 2008 participated in the redesign of the solution to use standard labor costs instead of actual labor costs. Based on the design I led three testing cycles of the Project Accounting solution for three UK companies in the group culminating in their go live in October and January of 2009. I have supported multiple month end and year end close cycles including reconciliations between PA to GL, FX and Allocation related issues in multiple global operating units.

Since starting the R12 upgrade project in 2010 with a Vision instance remediated dozens of Rice objects and identified/built new functionality such as a SLA manual journal entry WEBADI and SLA supported purchasing costs adjustments in projects and created playbook resulting in the successful execution of a conference room pilot in Dec-12. During this period worked with consultants to complete an assessment and internally with other teams to come up with a project plan that could be put out to be bid. Provided inputs to the Statement of Work for the selected vendor and transitioned the playbook maintained and built for several trial upgrades.

The Conference room pilots involved global team members across multiple operating units Resolved critical issues relating to deployment of purchasing costs adjustments, WEBADI and security of SLA journals in a multiple operating unit environment.

After a virtually error free upgrade and go live in May-13 supporting changes arising mainly out of SLA customizations

General Electric October 2006 to October 2007

Project Manager

February 2007 to November 2007 ( GE Infrastructure Financial Shared Services)

Tasked with handling a major global upgrade of the 170 Markview Document management system used by the AP shared services organization, I successfully planned and coordinated resources all round the globe including from the vendor in the first upgrade at the Oil and Gas Business in Italy . This requires seamless planning and coordination of hardware and software rollouts including services from third parties and starting with Italy later this year to US locations in 2008. The US locations are also planning database and application upgrades that require additional coordination between internal and external organizations.

October 2006 to February 2007 ( GE Nuclear Wilmington)

Participating in two rounds of testing and trouble shooting at the GE Nuclear facility in Wilmington. As a Project Accounting resource was responsible for helping them formulate a costing solution that will enable manufacturing cost and inventory tracking by project in the first wave rollout in July of 2007. Also provided direction in PO conversions that considerably simplified the task.

BearingPoint March 1999 to October 2006

Sr. Manager

Sample of projects:

Department of Health and Human Services- Indian Health Service

Heading the Project Accounting team at the Indian Health Services (IHS) for a grounds up Project Accounting Implementation at 12 Area Offices that manage hundreds of projects. Worked closely with users by administering questionnaires to categorize these projects into indirect projects that purely collect costs, capital projects and projects where the ownership is transferred to the Indian tribes or bought back under compacts. Mapped processes from the current building project management system into the to be process definitions. These processes were demonstrated with data from live projects including Purchase Orders in a Conference Room pilot. Mapped data elements from the current system into conversion specification strategies and conversion specifications.

Wrote white papers and analyzed alternatives to use a modified version of the common accounting solution below, which presented unique maintenance issues for IHS

Department of Health and Human Services – Center for Disease Control

Providing system design, testing and implementation of a common accounting realignment solution across multiple divisions of a Federal Department that have unique accounting structures and needs. Defined all possible use cases for Purchase Orders, Accounts Receivable and Payable Invoices and Ledger transactions that would be run through the regression test for the solution. Close to 50 test scripts with data for each one of the use cases were combined in Mercury Test Director to successfully conduct a regression test and user acceptance test for sign off. Analyzed alternatives to simplify the solution and perform the realignment in the ledger and provided costs for the alternatives. Analyzed, designed and implemented a solution to roll forward yearly projects into the new fiscal year.

Department of Veterans Affairs

After completing and analysis of existing Transaction Types in the legacy system, presented a detailed analysis to the CFO how the accounting would be mapped into each of the Oracle Financials modules ( AP, AR, FA, PA and GL). Delivered the complete proprietary and budgetary accounting required for Procure to Pay and Bill to Cash transactions within the scope of the first software build and the Integration Test Cycles for these transaction types. After go live completed a full cycle implementation including identifying scenarios as it relates to Prior Year accounting adjustments to handle converted Purchase Orders. Tasked with identifying deployment challenges with respect to unique sites within the department, administered questionnaires to numerous sites and proposed common business processes based on the responses.

AT&T Orlando

Analyzing, Designing and Implementing an Ariba to Oracle 10.7 Project accounting interface to generate Project and non Project related accounting, performing funds checking and recording commitment entries across instances at AT&T. Used CMM/SEI methodologies for writing the business requirements

Richardson Independent School District

Heading the Grants Accounting team to implement MS Project Connect and Oracle Grants to manage a $720 million Bond Issue over its life cycle at one of the largest school districts in Texas. Analyzed the existing 3000 task Bond Project and recommended breakdown into sub project by building. Designed and programmed the account generators so costs could be correctly accumulated against the work breakdown structures in these projects and reported to the board via Award Status Inquiry.

Visa International

Customization of Journal, Requisition Approval and PO,AP and FA account generator workflows to handle the non traditional legal entity relationships at one of the leading credit card issuing companies. Analyzed the requirement of approval within Iprocurement to support multi path approvals and customized the approval process to meet these requirements.

Motorola - GTSS Chicago, IL and Mansfield, MA

Customization of the PA to AR interface to handle milestone billing based on Sales Orders and Shipments. This handled complex costing (labor via ABT and material via COGS workflow), billing and tax issues for the manufacturing and selling entities and provided the basis for generating project profitability when building multi year multi million dollar cell phone networks. It also provided the basis for setting up revenue based cost accrual processes (WIP) accounting for the project.

Customization of the Oracle Engineering Change Order workflow to handle staged departmental workflows at the state of the art Motorola factory. The unique design of the workflow loops to handle parallel and sequential stages and dynamic approval lists was presented as a paper at OAUG.

Audit of the account generator setups in PO that supported the PA application at Mansfield and the development of an implementation plan to reconcile more than 2 Million dollars that had been incorrectly posted due to this incorrect setup.

ClubCorp

Configuration and implementation of ORACLE Applications including the Payables, General Ledger, Cash Management, Fixed Assets and Project Accounting in Spanish for Mexico and additional setup of two sets of books for Switzerland and Luxembourg and the other applications (AP, PA and FA).

Other employers

Phaedra Software Solutions Inc. (USA) December 1996 to March 1999

Principal Consultant

Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society (Jamaica) December 1993 to November 1996

Project Manager

EDUCATION, TRAINING AND AWARDS

Professional Degrees

Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore May 1981

MBA in MIS, Quantitative Methods and Project Management

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur June 1979

Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering

Speeches and Papers

Spoken and written on a number of IT areas including UNIX and networks.

Presented a paper at OAUG 2000 (Hawaii ) on the design challenges relating to the ECO

Published an article entitled “Distinct Balancing Segment Values and Sets Of Books” in the OAUG newsletter

Presented two papers in the International Oracle User Group entitled “From Text Files To Oracle Applications In One Step” and “Buy, Sell And Value Stocks Using Oracle GL, AP and FSG “.

Training

Numerous Oracle Training programs including Oracle CRM, HTB and JDeveloper

ABT and Tickmark training

Standard General Ledger: Upward and Downward Adjustments

FACTSII: The Next Reporting System

Large Body of on line training both at Bearingpoint and GE on compliance, ethics amongst other issues

Managers training at Bearingpoint

Selling Cycle and Presentation Skills training

Awards

Achieved Motorola's employee of the week award for efforts on the Engineering Change Order Workflow model in April 2000.

Received Certificate of Excellence in May 2003 for outstanding contributions and commitment to the Department of VA COREFLS project.

Received Certificate of Appreciation in April 2005 for outstanding performance and lasting contribution to the Department of HHS UFMS program.

Received Silver Beacon Award and a cash reward of $1000 in November 2005 in recognition of outstanding contributions exemplifying Bearing Point Values and contributions to the business.

Received Certificate of Appreciation in July 2006 for contributions to the CRP1 on behalf of the (Department of HHS) IHS UFMS project team.

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