Success story
PSCUIndustry• Financial Services

Solutions• OpenText™ Assure• OpenText™ MBPM

Leading financial services provider tracks
project spending to reduce costs, manage
operational risks and increase efficiency
PSCU delivers end-to-end project budget governance and compliancewith OpenText™ Business Process ManagementResults
End-to-end project
spending governance
Cost avoidance of roughly$7 million annually
Estimated reduction ofcycle times by 25%
Expected 35% reduction in
non-value-added activity throughautomation of manual tasks“From the current burn rate for a project, to actuals
versus plan, to every cost-management metric you
can think of, the OpenText Assure solution will giveit visibility and transparency.”
TMDaniel Rosen

Senior Vice President of Process and Program Excellence
PSCU

Leading financial services provider tracks project spending to reduce costs, manage operational risks and increase efficiency

Since 1977, PSCU has been a leading provider of financial services
to credit unions. Today, PSCU is the leading Credit Union Services
Organization (CUSO) in the United States, representing more than800 credit unions and offering industry-leading credit, debit andprepaid card servicing to more than 18-million cardholders andinnovative bill payment solutions to more than one million online bill
payment subscribers.

Background

PSCU is committed to providing the highest quality service to its
members—and developing a cutting-edge technological environmentis a critical element in delivering on this commitment. Recently, Daniel
Rosen, senior vice president of process and program excellence atPSCU, saw an opportunity to apply this approach internally to improve
effectiveness and efficiency in tracking spending on technology
projects and programs. Building on his past successful experience
with Assure and OpenText™ MBPM, Rosen and his team turned again to
Assure to develop an end-to-end governance solution that automatesprocesses for monitoring project expenditures to reduce project costs,
risks and inefficiencies.

Challenges

Project budget overruns

In a recent internal audit, PSCU identified a lack of governance, controls
and oversight when it came to tracking project spending. Technology
projects and programs were frequently over budget, resulting in anegative financial impact. With roughly $25 million to $35 million spenton projects annually, it was critical that PSCU establish a comprehensive
governance process.

“There was no end-to-end solution on how we allocate costs andinvoices from project conception all the way through to the generalledger,” Rosen said of the challenge. “For the past few years, we haveseen variance in the budget due to no end-to-end solution.”
Lack of budget visibility
One of the difficulties that PSCU faced with projects was a lack of visibility
into project spending, with project managers and executive sponsors
simply not knowing when projects were over budget. The process oftracking project costs was fragmented and sometimes manual, withsome data tracked in Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets and ultimately
housed in seven or eight different applications.
“Historically, when we’ve gone over budget on several projects, theexecutive sponsor didn’t have visibility into the whole process. That
was a major pain point,” Rosen explained.
Slow cycle times and manual inefficiencies
Manual processes for handling project invoices added to the frustration.
When an invoice related to a project was received, it was manually routed
through interoffice mail from the mailroom to the project manager to theappropriate executive for approval and then to accounting. Once paid,
the invoice was then sent to the capital accounting team to be put inthe general ledger. “It could take 7 to 14 days just to make it to theaccounting department. And, a lot of times, invoices would get lost
during this process,” Rosen said. The lack of automated business rules
around the invoice approval process also made it difficult to adhere tobudget controls or to understand any budget exceptions. “We needed tobe able to account for every single dollar from a project standpoint,”
added Rosen.

“I love the data thatcomes out of Assure.
I just can’t say
enough about it.”Daniel RosenSenior Vice President ofProcess and Program Excellence
PSCU

Leading financial services provider tracks project spending to reduce costs, manage operational risks and increase efficiency

Solution

An agile, intelligent business process platform

Rosen and his team looked at solutions from several major vendors
before deciding on the Assure solution from OpenText. Based on MBPM,
Assure is a leading business process management platform that includes
a work center for improved productivity, advanced reporting and analytics
for business insight and change tools for process improvement. PSCU
had already achieved significant success using the Assure platform forvarious customer services.

“Honestly, it was a pretty quick and easy decision to use the Assureplatform, since we’ve already developed a lot of successful solutions
on it. Assure is so flexible in terms of how much we can customize
and develop, which really helps us,” explained Rosen.

Implementation

Rosen and his team are completing the development of the solution fordeployment in early 2015. The new system will support the end-to-end
process that allows PSCU to match up costs with projects.

Using Assure and MBPM for workflow, the process starts off with thetraditional request for a project/capital investment. An executive sponsor
begins by submitting a project initiation document within the Assure
platform, which is then routed to the enterprise project management
office to review and then trigger the project to start in Microsoft® Project.

When a project invoice comes in from a vendor, it is attached as a request
in the Assure module and sent to the appropriate person for approvalusing automated business rules and logic. If someone approves aninvoice and it results in going over a budgeted element of the project, it
automatically routes to a next-level executive for further approvals.

As a final step, the invoice is sent to the accounting department forprocessing. “The second I hit ‘Approve,’ it gets launched to accounts
payable for payment, the general ledger for booking of the approval,
and also Microsoft Project so the project manager knows exactly how
many dollars were taken out of the project budget,” explained Rosen.

The new solution integrates into three systems and centralizes workflows
to the Assure platform, reducing the number of applications involved
by half. “We have an API from Workday integrated with Assure so weknow organizationally where it needs to route to for approvals, titles,
and description of titles. It’s going to integrate into Microsoft Project
Server and then into accounts payable,” said Rosen.

Benefits

Rosen expects to see major benefits in cost and risk avoidance,
reduced cycle times and improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Cost and risk avoidance

The primary driver of this initiative is cost avoidance. By eliminating
project budget overruns, PSCU can reduce annual costs by an estimated$7 million or more. However, Rosen explained that the benefits go beyond
the actual dollars saved.

“In the last few years that we went over budget, one of the biggest
consequences was that we actually had to reprioritize projects toaccommodate budget constraints. There’s a credibility risk there
in the market. And, any time we go over budget, that is a risk toour organization that affects profitability and revenue streams,”
he explained.

“By rolling out thisprocess with Assure,
we’ll reduce cycle times
by roughly 25%.”
Daniel Rosen

Senior Vice President of Process
and Program Excellence
PSCU

Leading financial services provider tracks project spending to reduce costs, manage operational risks and increase efficiency

Enhanced budget management effectivenessWith the new solution, project managers have a way to handle theirproject budgets more effectively. The Assure system gives complete
visibility to all executive sponsors, project managers and their executive
team. “From the current burn rate for a project, to actuals versus
plan, to every cost-management metric you can think of, the Assure
solution gives it visibility and transparency,” said Rosen.
Efficiencies and reduced cycle times

With the automation of manual processes, Rosen anticipates a significant
reduction in the time required for an invoice to complete the workflow
process from start to finish. “By rolling out this process with Assure,
we’ll reduce cycle times by roughly 25%,” explained Rosen.
PSCU will also realize savings related to the reduction of non-value-added
tasks related to the manual processes. Rosen estimates a 35% reduction,including no longer having to backfill positions. Additional benefits include
providing faster payments to vendors and partners and savings related
to decommissioning applications.

Next steps

Looking forward, Rosen will continue to combine business processes
and technology innovation in order to support PSCU’s commitment thatevery dollar spent goes to serve the credit unions.
With the success Rosen has seen from PSCU’s current Assure deployments and the upcoming project spending governance solution, heenvisions expanding its use even further. “Our goal within PSCU isfor the Assure platform to be the universal platform for almost any
process, with the end goal of connecting all processes together
within the Assure platform.”

Rosen also plans to continue using the customer data that is available
via Assure to gain business insight through data analysis. “We’re reallyfocused on using all the data out of Assure. It’s a huge part of how
we do things here,” he explained. “We’ve actually centered two strategies this year, based on some of the data that we’ve pulled fromAssure.”“It’s pretty powerful stuff. In fact, we’re close to being able to predict
when a customer is upset enough that they might leave, based onsome of the data we’re pulling,” added Rosen. PSCU recently targeted
three credit unions where they saw increased trends in issues andproblems, and they targeted them with proactive solutions.
Recently, a PSCU member notified PSCU that they were going to leave.
Using data from Assure, PSCU was able to identify the credit union’s
pain points and come up with solutions. “They actually signed acontract extension with us about three months later. I love this story,
because it’s so powerful. I love the data that comes out of Assure. I
just can’t say enough about it,” Rosen concluded.

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company,enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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