Your Most Significant Professional Achievement

During the past 10 months I have been designing and managing a new financial transformation project for one of our major global automotive client. The main aim of the project is to calculate and manage the accruals for sales allowance of $2 B per month. This project was started to replace client's existing business process which required more than two hundred linked excel spreadsheets and a manual effort of five full time analysts. The old process was extremely manual and had a lot of dependency on two particular analysts. Clients audit services had identified the old process as the riskiest area within the organization.

I quickly realized that I need a crash course in accounting to be able to better understand the business requirements and to be able effectively communicate with the business community. I initially reached out to one of my peers in our assurance practice. I also found out through my external network that another automotive client had implemented a similar project about 2 years back. I was able to arrange a meeting with their chief architect to learn from his experience.

After doing my homework, I scheduled various open and continual communications with the business community to resolve conflicting and contradictory requirements. Client's business team was extremely happy to learn that I was able to speak their accounting language and also to bring up various potential issues which they had not thought before. After gathering the initial requirements, I was able to assemble a strong team of technical and functional resources to implement the project. Throughout the project we kept all stakeholders completely engaged with regular communication and weekly reviews.

Currently we are implementing phase two of the project after successfully completing the initial phase of the project which has eliminated the biggest risk in the client's accounting process and led to extreme client satisfaction. This project initially started as my toughest