We prefer relying on relationships with the proven partner, Denis Afanasiev, Troika Dialog

– What tasks will be solved by FLEXTERA at Troika Dialog? Did the product architecture influence your choice of solution? What benefits do you think the SOA can provide?

– There were a lot of factors which influenced this choice. From the technical point of view, we value the architectural principles laid at the core of the system. FLEXTERA is a modular solution which supports such principles of service-oriented architecture, as flexible links between separate components and re-usable services. The IT architecture of our company is also built on the principles of component integration and interaction. That is why it is easier for us to implement FLEXTERA than any alternative software products. Significantly, this implementation provides a catalyst for developing new types of messages and services available for future use at the level of the enterprise information bus.

In terms of functionality, in my opinion, there are no similar products at the market. The function of personal income tax calculation is surely supported by other solutions but normally it cannot be separated as an individual product and goes as an integral part of a more complex system. For our company it is essential to have a separate module which will operate independently from other systems and keeps records of business events. Naturally, as the product is still new, it can have some drawbacks, but this provides us with an opportunity to directly influence the development of the solution and its functionality.

– What was your company IT landscape before the implementation of Diasoft’s new solution?

– We have a rather diverse IT architecture using a great deal of specialized solutions which is directly related to our business scale: we offer a broad range of products and operate in many jurisdictions. With regard to the calculation of personal income tax, the problem was that this function was distributed across multiple systems, which makes its maintenance rather complicated as we have to ensure consistent logic of the tax calculation on multiple systems. This explains the need to introduce a consolidated system for calculating the tax on personal income.

– Did your long-term collaboration with Diasoft influence the choice of the solution? As we know Troika Dialog has been supporting ongoing collaboration with Diasoft since the time it realized a pilot launch of Diasoft’s 5NT to support its operations with securities.

– We have always sought to maintain mutually beneficial partnerships with Diasoft, which of course influenced the choice of the product. We are currently engaged into a rather complex project and it would be wrong to start it with an unreliable or untested partner.

– What stage of FLEXTERA implementation are you running now?

– We are finalizing the designing, customization and adaptation of the product functionality to our business specifics. We have started the deployment and integration of the solution with our existing systems and plan to perform the solution acceptance testing at the beginning of the next year.

– How do you organize the interaction of IT-specialists and employees of Diasoft and Troika Dialog? How many people are engaged in the project?

–The project team comprises about twenty people. The working group also includes integration experts and end-users. Both parties have dedicated project managers who are responsible for project planning and control. Our interaction is pretty tight.

– What do you expect from this project? What is the planned time for the implementation?

– The project started in August and we plan to have it finalized by the second quarter of the next year. We expect that the process of personal income tax calculation will become more simple, fast and reliable. In addition, it won’t require ongoing IT support or any special efforts from the end-users.

– What economic effect do you expect from the FLEXTERA implementation?

– Currently our IT department supports two systems for personal income tax calculation. Due to frequent regulatory changes, several members of our staff are constantly involved in the process of changing calculation logic. After FLEXTERA implementation we plan to stop using our internal solution and engage our specialists to carry out more important tasks.