MRI Software Customisation & Implementation Project Rescue

The client

With more than €1 billion of gross assets under management, the client's portfolio has been developed through the opportunistic acquisition of listed real estate vehicles and through organic growth in our home markets. Approximately two thirds of the portfolio is in Germany, with the balance in Romania and central Europe. The portfolio primarily focuses on office and retail asset classes.

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The Brief

Having bought MRI Software, the client's planned roll out to their German and Romanian operations hadn’t gone to plan with their appointed contractor for functional consultancy and development works. The main issue concerned the customisations of the Commercial Management (CM), Accounts Payable, Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Multi-currency modules for each country. After months of delays, the requirement to go live with MRI was critical to the business and the client turned to TopUp Consultants to pick up the pieces and rescue the implementation project.

TopUp were able to demonstrate their experience in customising MRI Software for each country’s compliances and processes as well as their knowledge and support of MRI. Having had experience implementing MRI in both Germany and Romania TopUp satisfied the client’s due diligence the implementation project was passed over to them.

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Challenges

The propriety task for TopUp was to deliver and fix all of the of the third party customisations which the client had inherited from the previous contractor. This aspect was tasked to TopUp’s functional and development consultants in the UK who quickly established Germany required more attention due to stricter legal regulations. Functional consultancy is critical to each country’s implementation to ensure the system is fully legally compliant which Dean Nixon, Technical Director at TopUp, explains;

‍“The previous contractor hadn’t taken the time to do thorough information gathering which had obviously rebounded on them during the latter stages of their development cycle. Our detailed scoping and exhaustive testing ensures all customisations work efficiently and are delivered on time”.

The assessment enabled TopUp to scope the work and agree on a project schedule of 13 weeks until MRI would ‘go live’. The project schedule detailed the main stages as:

• Customisation fixing

• Historical data migration

• User Acceptance Training (UAT)

• Training

• Parallel run

• Go live

• Go live support and system stabilisation.

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The Result

A full legally compliant MRI Software system was implemented on time in each country with all customised modules functioning without issue. Full training was conducted on site and the client receives continued support via TopUp’s Helpdesk which ensures operational efficiency.

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Experience From The Project

Kyri Striftombolas, MD of TopUp Consultants commented “When a client has had their fingers burnt by one contractor it is of the utmost importance that any project is transparent with each step going according to plan to ensure the client’s expectations are met”.

He added, “TopUp Consultants are highly proficient in the customisation of MRI Software which is one of the great attributes of the system. The EMEA region represents the most diversified range of accounting procedures in the world. Therefore, it’s critical to our business that our functional consultants have the cross-cultural expertise to enable a smooth path for implementation in each country and the overall global integration of the system. Our reward on this project was a client confident in our abilities who now has an on-going Helpdesk solution tailored to their SLA requirements”.

“TopUp Consultants made possible for us the successful implementation of our property management system in both Germany and Romania. TopUp have worked with us as ‘Partners' in the true sense of the word, giving us advice to proceed on the best path (even if this resulted in reduced fees for them). As such we have developed together a strong management reporting platform and a trust that means we will continue to work together to seek further enhancements and efficiencies. We highly recommend them and look forward to working with them on future projects”. David Hayward, Group Corporate Finance Director

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