Take an enterprisewide view However brilliant it is at producing reports, processing transactions or managing general ledgers, traditional fund accounting software simply cannot build these pillars of excellence. To date, it hasn’t been its job to improve efficiency, quality or service. It has been a utility, not an excellence tool. To illustrate the point, consider the industry stalwart, the fund accounting pack. With traditional processes and systems, these lengthy paper- and printer-intensive documents are produced, checked, authorised, approved, discussed and archived daily. This has a negative impact on the ratio of fund accountants to funds. If you were to invent a process from scratch you would eliminate the need for their manual efforts with technology that validates and identifies exceptions which need hands-on attention. You would immediately free highly skilled fund accountants from paper-chasing routines and allow them to focus on value-adding accounting functions. Similarly, why would you persevere with adding separate accounts within a balance sheet for each new share class if you didn’t have to, given the complexity that introduces? It’s handled that way now because of the limitations of current systems, but from an operational perspective there are much better ways of supporting diverse share classes. The same is true of reporting, of requesting data and the myriad processes that make up daily accounting procedures. This signals a paradigm shift in an industry where the need for audit trails, transparency and checks and balances is expressed as the need to sign something, to view a report and get something printed out. Re-engineering the administration process with new technology means that the transparency, compliance and quality assurance can still be achieved at a level that meets or even surpasses fund accountants’ needs, but without the paper and hand-written signatures. In every organisation there is an intersection between product, accounting and operations. What these stakeholders really need is a platform that enables them to come together with their technology peers under a common vocabulary and a common approach to systems architecture that supports not just their own function and technology solutions, but the business objectives at an enterprise-wide level. Implement a single, seamless platform that has at its core a fundamental, in-depth knowledge of the product domain and the processes surrounding it, and the results can be transformational. It’s the difference between focusing on optimising individual pieces of the puzzle and bringing operational excellence to your entire business.