"Stakeholders were happy to get an early feeling of the final stage... It replaced PowerPoint presentations and allowed for on-the-fly client changes."

Background
This customer is one of the world's largest financial institutions, with over $1B in assets, 60,000 employees and offices in 74 countries. In an effort to streamline operations, the bank needed to consolidate 13 procurement systems into a single global application that could be used by all customer employees to purchase everything from paper clips to fixed income investments. This major initiative at the bank, was funded at over $170 million and outsourced to Accenture.

Challenge
Given that business stakeholders were spread across 20 different countries, business analysts in five countries and the development resources in three other countries, project managers were concerned about eliciting and approving application requirements in a timely manner. Any delays in the functional design effort could end up delaying the entire project and specifications that were not accurate the first time would put the project at risk for significant rework costs. Paper-based specs and whiteboard drawings simply could not meet the needs of such a geographically diverse stakeholder group.

Result
Before starting any coding, the team used iRise to simulate the approval management application, the ordering application, the invoices completion application and the portal application - including interfaces to packaged applications like SAP and Ariba. The iRise shared server was an ideal platform for global stakeholder review and interactive specifications approval, as everyone involved could log in and interact with the simulation together in virtual review meetings. The customer approved the simulation as an accurate blueprint for what to build, raising confidence that the end result was on target.

Simulating in iRise instead of creating static requirements documents, the team realized functional design effort savings of 40%. As a result, the geographically dispersed development teams delivered the project on time with very little rework.