RMB Investment Services wins with Oracle and KPMG Consulting

Leading generation consulting firm, KPMG Consulting has implemented an Oracle financial solution at RMB Investment Services (RMBIS). The solution has not only increased the company`s ability to process monthly transactions three-fold (from 9 600 to 29 000) but has also enabled the company to reconcile its books at month end within 24 hours and completely automated its internal administration processes.

Prior to the implementation of Oracle Financials, the company took 14 days to reconcile its accounts. However, through the deployment of the product set, RMBIS has been able to reconcile its accounts on a daily basis. "As part of the implementation for RMBIS, which included the general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and cash management modules, KPMG Consulting customised the standard functionality of the cash management module to be in line with the existing in-house procedures. This has enabled RMBIS to reconcile multiple transaction lines to multiple statement entries," says Carl Bothma, managing consultant at KPMG Consulting. "Previously, the Oracle Financial suite could only reconcile transactions to one bank statement line at a time. Another benefit that RMBIS has seen through the product deployment, is that their reconciliation process is now automated, whereas previously it had to be activated manually."

"RMBIS chose to implement the Oracle Financial product set, as we required a new financial system that would improve internal efficiencies, enhance reporting capabilities and provide fully automated functionality," says Gert Vorster, COO at RMBIS. "Oracle offered the best solution on the market and was able to deliver on the above criteria and still handle large transaction volumes. In addition, the add-on programme that the KPMG Consulting team wrote, gave us the required flexibility to add additional unit trust structured investments when needed, which further contributed to the success of the project."

"With the Oracle Financial product set, manual intervention is only needed in exceptional circumstances, thus cash management occurs daily. We are now able to close our bank accounts within one day after month-end and reporting is completed within a week after month-end. The daily transactions created by our administration system are automatically imported into Oracle Financials during the night and ready to be reconciled first thing in the morning," says Vorster.

"One of the added benefits that the Oracle product suite provided during the implementation was that the system was sufficiently scalable to deal with a doubling of transaction volumes in the period from start to completion of the project," says Bothma.