Citibank provides comprehensive financial services to over 8,000 corporations and institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, and services for cash management, securities, and trade finance, as well as capital markets and corporate finance

1. To standardize and streamline the HR processes in the Asia Pacific region for the purpose of improving efficiency and productivity at the country and regional level.
2. To maximize the return on expenses paid for the global license as well as simplify the related cost/efforts in building any interface and synchronization between Regional and Global systems
3. To centralize the data center activities in Singapore so as to provide for more efficient use of hardware resources and improved control with professional data center management.
4. To lower the maintenance and support cost improve data integrity, backup/recovery support, contributing to higher reliability, performance and availability of system.
5. Propose database architecture for implementing a Regional HRMS systems
6. Identification of Base Line
7. Carry out fit gap analysis of existing systems with familiarization database.
8. Document functional specifications
9. Publish and sign off functional specifications
10. Initiate and carry out defect tracking mechanism
11. Establish change control procedures
12. Build multi country capability

Foundation was selected as the PeopleSoft implementation partner with responsibility for project management, requirement gathering, system upgrade, system design, development, documentation, software testing, user acceptance testing, regional implementation roll out, and technical support. System design and development required conceptualization of regional functionality that is common to all countries and country specific features to be delivered in a single application with controlled access.

The first phase of the regional implementation project included business processes for Administering Workforce, Recruitment, Training, and data transfer to Citibank global HR systems in the US, and the interface to country payroll systems. The Second phase delivers compensation and position management functionality. The regional HRMS system aligns with Citibank's global HR strategy and consolidates IT resources at data center level on a common system platform.

The common system platform would service all HR related business and corporate functions for the countries in Asia Pacific. It will standardize and streamline the HR processes in the region towards improving the efficiency and productivity at the country and regional level.

Initial activities included preparation of the project plan and development of a baseline functional specification (BFS) as a part of Foundation's Go Live methodology for PeopleSoft implementation. A baseline database was setup as for user familiarization. The BFS includes all screen and explanation of functionality and is targeted for the end user to help in rapid and self-learning of the baseline system. The BFS and base familiarization database was accessed by end users spread across 13 countries. These users raised requirements and provided input for adopting the regional system.

Prior to submitting the system for user acceptance, the project team used the automated testing tools - SQA Robot. A thorough and rigorous testing methodology was used to identify the improvements required in the design and development work. In addition to testing the functionality the tools also helped in stress test with high volume of transactions.

After submitting the system to automated testing, the regional HRMS system had undergone detailed User Acceptance testing by users from the 13 countries. To facilitate UAT, all country users were called to the regional office for one week for hands-on exposure to the system.

Data Conversion plan from legacy systems to new regional system was planned which involved design of formats for each country to submit the relevant data and uploading to centralized server at Singapore. Some countries opted for direct data entry. In order to ensure correctness and smooth implementation, second UAT was required for each country, separately.

Selected piece of customization was done offsite to speed up the customization and also to control project cost. Foundation consultants with 4 - 6 years of experience on various commercial packages and detailed training at our Center of Excellence helped in timely completion of the development with documentation.

• Application upgrade from PS 6.x to 7.5x
• Merged two country's baseline systems (building intricacies that challenged the fabric of the existing system)
• Built multi-country capability using SetID & Business Unit across 8 modules (thoroughly exploited the related features to the fullest possible extent)
• Normalized and customized requirements of 10 countries into a single database (achieved unity in diversity)
• Developed 200 reports/letters off-site (at CoE, India)
• Carried out automated testing using Rational's SQA (paving the way for the first live implementation of SQA in the history of Citibank)
• Imparted training to 35 country power users
• 110 users across 10 countries performed UAT simultaneously
• Lowest ever incidences of UAT errors
• Achieved highest rating for documentation among all Citibank Projects
• System was delivered bang on schedule