Completion Report
Project Summary:
The University process over 300,000 payments/invoices to suppliers, staff and students annually. There was a reasonable risk of incorrect payment, duplication and fraud going undetected in this volume of transactional volume. The risks were also felt to be increasing as Accounts Payable (AP) staff were processing more payments than ever before and with fewer resources.
To support risk management procedures and reduce the level of risk associated with fraudulent payments being processed via the Accounts Payable team 3rd party software was introduced to review payments and provide exception reports for analysis.
The third party software can highlight high risk transactions i.e. payments close to authorisation limits, frequent credit notes, duplicate payments etc.
This project was specific to the applications owned by Finance's FIS team.
Scope:
This project had a budget of 50 days in 2016/17 which were not used. 8 days were raised within the 2017/18 budget to enable the work to be completed. The work outlined and prioritised by the FIS team, in discussion with IS Apps aligned to project objectives.
Objectives:
| No | Description | Objective Met? |
|---|---|---|
|
Develop and support software enhancements to provide predictive analytic reporting (to spot trends, patterns and anomalies aligned to potential fraudulent activities). |
yes | |
|
Support the development of processes to reduce risk of fraud across the University |
yes | |
|
Improve the level of resilience against fraud across Accounts Payable |
yes | |
| Align fraud protection processes and systems to meet external legislative requirements | yes | |
| Reduce level of manual interventions required to identify potential fraudulent activities | yes |
Deliverables:
| No | Deliverable Description | Deliverable Met? |
| Prioritised list of requirements aligned to software enhancements. | partially | |
| Fully defined requirements for each high priority enhancements. | partially | |
|
A schedule for development, acceptance testing, and delivery, taking resource availability in Finance and IS Apps into account including;
|
partially |
Benefits:
| No | Description | Benefit Realised? |
|---|---|---|
| By improving accounts payable governance the University can strengthen its controls against fraud in the face of an increasingly complex financial environment. Audit and Risk Committee are increasingly concerned about the level of risk that the University is subject to and the growing value of fraudulent payments. This is one of the way of highlighting potentially suspect transactions which doesn’t rely on human intervention and checking. | yes |
Success Criteria:
| No | Description | Criteria Met? |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Software enhancements delivered to provide predictive analytic reporting |
yes
|
|
|
Reduced risk of fraud within Accounts Payable processes |
yes
|
|
|
Improved automated processes for fraud prevention activities |
yes
|
Analysis of Resource Usage: Staff Usage Estimate: 50 days (reduced to 8 days)
Staff Usage Actual: 14 days
Staff Usage Variance: 357%
Other Resource Estimate: N/A
Other Resource Actual: N/A
Other Resource Variance: N/A
Explanation for Variance:
Much of the work undertaken outwith the scope of this project and was undertaken by the FIS team. There was therefore little IS resource allocated to this project as outlined in the budget re-estimate and actual usage.
Key Learning Points:
Successes:
- Objectives were met and benefits achieved.
- JIRAs and cross team working went well at the time of implementation.
Learning Points:
- Scope, roles and responsibilities within and outwith the project could have been clearer. Clearer requirements could have been established within the scope of FIN120 at the outset hence the deliverable has been set to partial.
- Due to the availability of the supplier bookings are made when they have cancellations to complete work. This is difficult to co-ordinate in a project environment however is unavoidable. Strong communication through projects with this issue is vital going forward.
- Due to complexities and dependencies, communication and controls aligned to the eFin upgrade project (FIN118) is vital across IS, Finance and external supplier.
Outstanding issues:
FIN118 UAT incorporate changes undertaken within FIN120. This also includes the issue that arose in JIRA FIN120-4 which involved implementing a workaround due expenses needing to be upgraded to CF11 to accommodate how expenses reads data from the finance database (which FIN118 is migrating to Oracle 12c). This issue has been picked up within FIN118.