Chief Financial Officer
Commercial Insurance Brokerage

• We have been working with Acendex since December, 2000. We began our relationship when I decided to restructure our small IS department in order to make it more efficient and more cost effective. Historically, we had an internal system engineer and were using a small IS consulting firm to supplement his activities. Our restructuring was unexpectedly accelerated when our system engineer decided to work for our consulting firm.
• Not feeling overly comfortable with retaining our current consulting firm, I turned to Acendex for help in completing our restructuring. I hired a network administrator to handle day-to-day activities and sub-contracted all the system engineering to Jonathan and his team. The results have been exactly what I expected. Our internal customer satisfaction is significantly higher and our data processing costs have decreased 35% since 2000.
• While planning the restructuring of the department, it became clear to me that our previous consulting firm and our internal system engineer had done an inadequate job of documenting our system design, our hardware configuration, our software configuration and our growth plan for the future. I became extremely concerned that I did not know our system design, what hardware we had or what software we had. In addition, we had no clearly delineated path for the future. The ability to solve these issues and provide an understandable plan for the future was my key criterion in selecting Acendex.
• I spent a lot of time with Jonathan talking about their ability to handle this type of work and quickly put them to the test documenting and evaluating our system. As it turned out, our previous firm had done an acceptable job designing our system, but all of the design work was in their heads. Jonathan's team did a great job documenting what we had and where they believed weaknesses existed.
• We then turned to planning for the future and produced an understandable plan for the next three years. The result was a document that showed where we were and where we are going in the IS department. We relied on this document in planning our 2002 IS budget. In addition, we already know our plans for 2003. We know what our weaknesses are and we know how we are going to address them. I am very comfortable that as the CFO of the agency I understand our current IS structure and our plans for the future. Jonathan and his team have done a great job.