STP and the euro

It may sound strange, but some of the biggest problems that corporates face in moving over to the euro are knowing exactly what changes need to take place!   The trouble is, there's too many choices, and if you're unlucky you'll find that the more obvious approaches yield some decidedly messy results for many business areas.

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Euro conversion, et al

The obvious goal of euro conversion projects is to introduce the euro and phase out the legacy national currencies from all systems and business processes. But there are many problems for the unwary to find in achieving this, and the overall project is as much a business problem as a system one that the IT department cannot be expected to do this without support. STP has the ability to understand your business's cash-flows and can add much value by suggesting ways of addressing these problems: some approaches are cheaper and simpler, but sometimes other approaches are needed to effectively support you business.

Then there's functionality changes to consider — mostly to support the changeover period and customer queries for the subsequent year or so.

Putting all this together, testing it and deploying it is conventional project/programme management work, but on a large scale as most systems in any company will be affected by the change.

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STP's euro experience

STP offers huge experience of managing euro projects. The founder when at a large investment bank in 1997, led the organisation to understand the implications for change on the organisation and was asked to form an Emu project to address them.  Most recently, STP was contracted to run the entire euro conversion project for the European distribution operations of a large US entertainment company, including some retail businesses with e-commerce and telephony customer sales. This included:

• Managing the differing requirements of 25 businesses in euro-zone countries
• Leading the development managers of the 7 impacted MIS project teams' to suitable solution designs.
• Driving their planning, development of the 23 affected applications, their testing and deployment – business-specific systems, and internal GL & accounting system supported 47 European companies' accounts.
• Designed & wrote a euro intranet site.
• Closely involved users in full dress rehearsal testing, in a busy commercial year for the client.
• Converted 114 MIS systems in the European territories to euro and removed their national legacy national currencies.
• Also co-ordinated with and guided those responsible for the 27 third party system changes and the 10 US based systems.

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US and UK Warner Bros. offered themselves as a client reference site for STP at the end of this project.

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