Investment Planning System

Implementation Tasks and Objectives

Investment Planning System was developed to provide complete information on investment activities that serve as a basis for executive decision-making on project efficiency, elaboration of budgeting and procurement plans. After individual investment project budgets are approved, they are consolidated into investment portfolios on Macro regional and Corporate Center levels.

The system automates both workflow processes of budget negotiating and monitoring for individual projects and investment portfolios, and technological process of data consolidation and analysis at multiple levels.

Automated Workflow Processes:

• Negotiation and monitoring of investment projects;
• Elaboration of investment portfolio;
• Integration of investment portfolios into the Company budget

Automated Technological Processes:

• Information collection and distribution in multiple directions, providing for simultaneous data input at various levels (such as Region, Macro region, Corporate Center);
• Information processing and authorization, providing for concurrent work on an Investment Project at various levels
• Consolidation of information at various levels, information sharing between all the divisions participating in investment planning process
• Control of planning process regulated in line with prescribed reporting terms and formats,
• Data management, including structured archiving and scheduled information updates;

Solution Functionality

The System automates MTS investment planning and analysis process, provides flexible reporting on investment projects of the Company based on incoming information:

• Investment Project initiation
• Investment Project coordination
• Elaboration of investment portfolio based on consolidation of separate project plans on the level Macro regions and the Corporate Center;
• Breakdown of Macro region and Corporate Center investment portfolio by functional responsibilities;
• Flexible reporting including: selection of investment project list based on any criteria, report on capital investments, procurement plan etc

Investment project plan if built based on a special investment form, or project passport, which contains the following information:

• Reference information on an investment object;
• Expenditure plan for the given project with monthly item-based breakdown;
• Information on the project initiator;
• List of employees responsible for editing and coordination of the project along with fulfillment status;
• List of employees responsible for coordination of the project along with fulfillment status;
• History of project changes.

Project passports are created and modified only by authorized employees, each project is associated with a list of authorized “editors” and “assessors”. Each project passport undergoes a number of mandatory editing and approval stages in accordance to the approval matrix defined for each particular organizational and functional level. Project passports may be created at various regional levels. Region level data includes expenditures of the selected region, and macro regional data consolidates expenditures from several regions included in that project. Approval of separate investment project budgets is followed by consolidation of investment portfolios at the levels of macro regions and of the entire company. The resulting corporate investment plan is sent for approval to the shareholders meeting. The final result is an approved corporate investment project financing plan. The data structure supports the Company’s distributed regional structure and its hierarchical functional structure.

Support of the distributed regional structure:

• Region — the first level in the regional structure of the Company, it may consist of several legal entities;
• Macro region (MR) — contains several Regions, could be a separate division of the Company;
• Corporate Center (CC) — includes all Macro regions and Regions, could be a separate division of the Company.

Support of the hierarchical functional structure of the Company:

• Division: a minimal unit of the functional structure
• Department: may contain several divisions
• Block: may contain divisions and/or several blocks

The System ensures the following information security capabilities:

• Access level to each investment project data is defined depending on functional responsibilities, functional hierarchy level and the empoyee’s role;
• Tracking changes history, including date, time and actions performed by a particular user; controlled limits for approval stages time/iterations;

Implementation Features

• Support of the distributed regional structure of the Company and the hierarchical functional structure of the Company
• Powerful analytical tool that enabled the full control over the budgets in terms of management and finance accounting, per projects, per regional and business units
• Sophisticated workflow procedures for financing orders approval, supports attachments
• No restrictions on the number of users working with the System concurrently

Implementation Results

The System automated the process of investment project plan consolidation and approval and has proved to be successful during the 2005 fiscal year budget preparation. The system provided the powerful analytical tool for all the employees working with Investment Projects within the new corporate investment planning and control system. Enhancement of the system functionality and further integration with other MTS applications are planned for the next stage of the project

Project Terms and Scale

• System development and Implementation from July 2004 to October 2004;
• System support and enhancement - till current time.
• Approximate number of users: 1,500.
• Technological Implementation and Tools: MS SQL Server, ASP, Visual Basic.NET

Investment Project Planning System has been built as a modular system designed as a set of applications with a single database. The system functionality is split into three subsystems:

• Planning and reporting system, it provides core business functionality and is used by the majority of users
• Reference data management system, consists in data on structure of the Company, employees, types of investment projects, expense structure etc
• Administration system, provides information on user access rights.
• Planning and reporting system is implemented as a web client; web services technology is used to access the business logic. The other two applications are implemented as a “thick” client using client/server technology.