"Before the Hollinger divestiture, the community newspapers operated with several locally maintained accounting packages, 30 general ledgers and no uniform chart of accounts," says John Leader, vice president of finance for Osprey. Extracting, processing, and then consolidating accounting data was time-consuming and staff-intensive, while the various charts of account made it difficult to extract comparable management information. This onerous consolidation process made it difficult to create detailed reports that would enable financial benchmarking and help determine the newspapers' most effective practices.

Entries were posted to different accounts at the community papers than at headquarters, who were operating from different charts of account. Even when overall totals were in agreement, staff sometimes had trouble reconciling specific transactions.

Osprey sought to encourage the fiscal control and responsibility the accountants felt they had lost." Hollinger had operated in a de-centralized fashion," says Leader. "I wanted to enhance that independence for our community newspapers by offering a more efficient and transparent financial reporting process under Osprey's umbrella."

Finding Reliable Answers...Fast!

Osprey jumped at the opportunity to streamline its operations. With software from several major vendors already implemented at the community newspapers, Osprey focused on function, flexibility, and economy. "We needed an easy-to-use solution that could incorporate our existing network and processes while allowing access from standard Web browsers," Leader explains. The requirement for establishing consistency across geographically remote locations favored a thin-client, Internet-based approach, which would allow Osprey to leverage off-the-shelf software and utilize the Internet to standardize operational procedures and integrate diverse business systems.

"Our goal was to avoid rewriting complex code which might cost us tens of thousands of dollars in IT consulting fees every year," says Paul Haigh, controller for Osprey.

Osprey chose Microsoft products for its technical infrastructure and standardized on a single business management system, Sage Accpac ERP, which already included all the necessary accounting features and Web-based architecture. Osprey appreciated that Sage had an outstanding reputation for delivering functional upgrades at regular intervals and reasonable prices and, since a third of the newspapers were already using Sage solutions, installing Sage Accpac at headquarters allowed Osprey to leverage existing skills in a common business environment.

"There was no reason to reinvent the wheel when we had high quality software available from Sage and Microsoft," Leader says. "Sage Accpac and Microsoft SQL Server both have excellent track records, functionality and price/performance; plus they work together flawlessly."

One Step at a Time

Osprey and its Sage business partner, AJM Systems Inc., agreed to rebuild the company's business and technical infrastructure in phases. "The first step was building a parallel network and server infrastructure with which to migrate data and support the new business processes," explains Jack Mulchinock, president of AJM Systems. "Step two was implementing Sage Accpac as an enterprise-wide financial system, and step three will be to migrate circulation and advertising management—the remaining legacy applications—into the technical infrastructure."

AJM recommended that Osprey replace Hollinger's frame relay network with a virtual private network (VPN) solution so the newspapers could securely access headquarters over the Internet. Citrix Application servers, Microsoft IIS servers, and Microsoft Windows 2000 servers running Microsoft Office Professional and Microsoft Exchange were purchased and installed at headquarters. AJM wrote the necessary data conversion interface applications using Microsoft Visual Basic to complete the migration from the legacy systems, finishing the first phase ahead of schedule.

Once the underlying support systems were in place, it was time to get Osprey's Toronto headquarters set up on Sage Accpac. After agreeing on a standard chart of accounts, headquarters migrated to the new software and began monitoring results. As milestones for accuracy and consistency were achieved, the remote offices went online, running their new and old systems in parallel until the entire concept was well proved. Despite tight deadlines, the second phase of Osprey's project—implementing Sage Accpac—finished a week early and under budget.

"We expected resistance to learning the new software but encountered just the opposite," remarks Haigh. "As word went around that the newspapers were regaining control of their general ledger, rather than just managing somebody else's sub-ledger, people fought to get to the head of the conversion line."

Hot Off the Presses: Financial Results

The final step, migrating historical data to the new system, is in progress. In the meantime, the new system has already begun to pay dividends.

"By streamlining our processes with Sage Accpac, we substantially reduced our reporting overhead," says Leader. "The result is the availability of up-to-the-minute financial data, and a reduction in administrative staff by one full-time equivalent in Toronto. We can also reassign another full-time equivalent in each of our four regions, which will help boost the newspapers' profit margins."

Besides improving productivity, the new system is also enabling better management practices. As financial information is always current, accurately gauging the impact of a transaction is as simple as posting it to a ledger and rerunning reports.

"Sage Accpac has facilitated collaboration among the accounting teams," says Haigh. "We can now provide higher-quality information in a timely fashion and deliver it in a way that senior management finds immediately relevant and useful."