Arcotect Limited

American Express ("AE") has a history of 150 years and is now a leading global card, financial and travel services company whose commitment to providing excellent services to their customers is unwavering.

Today, as a successful global corporation with diversified businesses, AE has a foresight of the vital role of their human capital playing in the new digital economy. It realizes that time spent on administrative work, calculation, documentation and consolidation of data for various reporting purposes can be wisely invested on more strategic and productive initiatives in order to enhance company's competitiveness which it always strive for.

AE Asia Pacific regional office was using a localized HR application integrating with the HR management application used by AE international head office. AE Asia Pacific has two streams of businesses, which are AE International and AE Bank, and Hong Kong is its Asia hub. The two operations altogether have over 1,000 staff in the region. AE Asia Pacific came across defects of the existing HR application, namely wrong calculations, inaccurate report formats which cost their staff much extra time to make remedies. More seriously, the fatal defect was that the existing HR application was not able to integrate with their global legacy system that caused a lot of data migration problems and involved unpredictable cost. Moreover, AE Asia Pacific foresaw that it needed to treat the Y2K issue and the new MPF schemes seriously. As a result, it immediately looked for an e-Business enabler which could provide professional e-Business consultancy and e-Solutions firm to develop a more capable HR solution to solve all the problems they came across with the existing system.

This was in fact a critical re-engineering project on AE's global human capital management function, and Arcotect accomplished this within three months. From negotiation, system design, implementation, pilot run, UAT to live run and launch of the new system, Arcotect successfully showed that it is equipped with the best-of-breed IT expertise as well as professional knowledge on Human Capital Management. Even more significant was that Arcotect's HR solution could fully integrate with AE's global legacy system.

Upon completion of e-Business consultancy and collection of technical specifications, Arcotect provided full documentation to AE for its future reference. Documents of functional requirement specifications and complete system specifications were produced in order to facilitate future system enhancement. Moreover, user manuals were also prepared for the sake of staff training.

During the implementation, interference to AE's daily operations was minimized to almost zero. Arcotect's professionals undertook the whole project while only two AE staff were involved. This further proved that Arcotect's unparallel professionals are fully capable of providing e-Business consultancy services and total e-Solutions.