Project Profile 6

• Government sector
• Provincial
• Agriculture
• Lending/Insurance

Client: Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC) is a provincial crown corporation with a private sector Board of Directors that provides farmers, agribusinesses and other small businesses loans, crop insurance and farm income disaster assistance. AFSC is closely linked with (and partly funded by) government but also works closely with many private sector companies through key business alliances. AFSC reports to Alberta's Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development (AFRD). AFSC has provided Alberta farmers with hail insurance for over 70 years, and has grown into a diverse Corporation with several core businesses: crop insurance, farm loans, commercial loans and farm income disaster assistance.

Project: To select a vendor/partner through an RFP process and implement a new Financial ERP system from the blue printing process, through development, testing, training, user acceptance and go-live phases.

Planning:  As Program, Manager at AFSC, I created an RFP with evaluation guidelines that required the vendor to perform a gap-analysis and then provide on-site demonstrations on how their ERP system could meet our requirements.  After this was completed I had a formal meeting with all stakeholders and summarized our findings.  We selected a vendor and then started on the next phase, creating blueprints in order to create an accurate SOW for  implementation of the ERP system.  The sponsor decided on a multi-vendor solution, using a third party to do the project, together with the vendor.  I was deeply involved with this ERP project from conception to go-live on April 1st, 2009.