If you were insourcing your finance department and function after years of having it out sourced to a third party, what would your approach be?
Answers
Start with the outsource vendor contract. I am sure there is an attachment that identifies every service performed. Take a look and decide what tasks are critical and what tasks are missing. Develop a plan to phase in the tasks as you hire. I recommend building top down. The first hire should have a broad knowledge base and be responsible for documenting policies and procedures. This approach allows you to build slowly. Depending on how long you have outsourced this function will dictate how long it will take to build the function in-house. If you rush it, errors will occur and money will be wasted. Build a plan - track, measure and adjust as needed. Goodluck
Agreeing with Regis, but with a different spin:
You are not growing a finance function, but essentially transplanting one. Normally you build slowly from the middle. Here you need a team-maker, and to Regis' point, start at the top. Hire a
What you don't want to do is insource in dribs and drabs. What systems are they going to choose? Will those systems work together? Will the people make a good team? Etc... Insource to a plan, and let the CFO architect that.
The knowledge transfer, overlap of resources, hand-off, and subsequent follow-up / trouble shooting should be detailed / negotiated in the transition plan.
When a company outsources its functions the first step is to fully document the process and all transactions that get recorded. The outsourcer, whether they are local in your city or based in India, first completes that documentation step. During the documentation step, the outsourcer generally assigns staff to those areas, and during the transistion the outsourced staff will train on site with your team and refine the documentation. The end result should be a clean hand off. As process changes occur the outsourcer will update their procedures.
Acquiring the procedures back from the outsourcer, or obtaining a current copy of every procedure they handle will be critical in determining how to restaff that area.
The steps to outsource will be the same steps to in source. You will need a project manager in your
If you can get the documentation back, and you should be able to, you should be able to reconstruct your department with about a 3 month getting up to speed time.
You might try hiring a project manager for the accounting side of the equation who has had experience on the outsourcing side, say from a
The accounting will not be hard to transistion, the IT component will take some more thought since you probably have to reconfigure your
Think of this project as a 3 month onboarding, while still needing the outsourcer to complete the workload, and an additional 3 month period to stabilize as the new supervisors and controllers get things under control.
Do this in Q2, not Q3 or Q4.
Best.