“In recent years, our organization has experienced near doubling in size owing to some large acquisitions. With that, the usefulness of our financial budgeting and consolidation systems was outgrown. The professionals at Ranzal were able to quickly develop a comprehensive system including databases and input modules, a standard reporting system, and Excel templates that allow the entire company to feed financial information back to our Planning department. The system was designed for over 500 users, and was deployed in a flawless manner.”

- Sue Lau, Vice President Financial Planning & Analysis, Marsh Inc


Company Background

Marsh, the world's leading insurance broker and risk advisor, has 26,000 employees and provides advice and transactional capabilities to clients in over 100 countries. Marsh is a unit of Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC), a global professional services firm with more than 55,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $11 billion. MMC also is the parent company of Guy Carpenter, the risk and reinsurance specialist; Mercer, the provider of HR and related financial advice and services; Oliver Wyman, the management consultancy; and Kroll, the risk consulting firm. 

Project Goals & Objectives

  • A robust, comprehensive application to meet the needs of global enterprise
  • 24x7 accessibility and ability to convert 60+ different currencies
  • Easy-to-deploy solution, providing better reporting
  • New application needed to be developed in three months

Business Issues

With back-to-back acquisitions of two other professional services firm, Marsh’s budget system and processes came to a standstill. They had doubled in size, and as a result, their existing solution did not have the capability to handle the new demands. Marsh needed a new budgeting application that could scale upwards to the now 500+ users worldwide and handle conversions of more than 60 different currencies. In addition, they needed the new solution to provide better reporting and to eliminate the cumbersome process of sending data through legacy infrastructure to the print stations.

Ranzal Role

For reporting, new flexibility and user friendliness was key. Ranzal consultants developed custom data entry templates, report menus, and ad hoc reporting capabilities with intuitive drop-downs. The ease of use of the new application resulted in no need for training. The web-based application was deployed to the client desktop utilizing a “three-click” installation process and version control. This provided superior performance and response times that can now be defined by the users, not the developers.

With executive management support, the IT project team and finance personnel were able to implement a new budgeting application to over 500 global users who consolidate the budget for more than 60 currencies every ten minutes, 24x7. The new application also was designed with multiple hierarchies to accommodate the company’s substantial growth.

When faced with management’s mid-development request for the additional ability to forecast client revenue, the project team was able to rapidly develop an application to support the mid-month client revenue forecasting process with actual to budget output.

Business Benefits

  • Support of worldwide budgeting process of over 500 global users, 24x7
  • Easy to use, flexible reporting, requiring zero training
  • Empowered project team; application supports organizational change and additional application enhancements