Family Dollar is a growing Fortune 400 Company with a mission to be a compelling place for its customers to shop. Family Dollar is a selfserve, cash-and-carry neighborhood discount store in low-to-middle income neighborhoods with over 6,800 stores from Maine to Arizona. Family Dollar’s annual sales exceed $3 billion.
Challenge
Family Dollar outsourced much of its Equity Management Process administration to Smith Barney, a subsidiary of Citigroup. With the exception of Family Dollar’s retention-restricted associates, Smith Barney provided self-service functionality via its web and Voice Response System (VRS) functionality, including trade execution, account information, and grant/award acceptance.
Retention-restricted associates are served through an employee-staffed trading desk in Atlanta. Perficient was tasked with mapping the future state for the stock option administration program. At the beginning of the project, Family Dollar had little-to-no documentation of its equity management program. The end goal of the engagement was to provide this documentation for Family Dollar, while defining the future-state processes for working with their new third-party provider and identifying opportunities to streamline where possible.
Solution Deployed
Perficient began by documenting the current state-procedures (performed in house) and identifying where gaps and pain points existed. Once complete, Perficient began documenting the future-state processes, plugging in where the equity management process was to be outsourced, defining the interface points, creating templates, key controls, and detailed operating procedures.
Ultimately, more than 20 flows related to the equity management process were documented, spanning human resources, legal, accounting and payroll. The Operating Procedures (more than 100 pages of detailed step-by-step instructions, screen shots, hyperlinks, and roles and responsibility definitions) provide a how-to guide, training tool, and disaster recovery plan. The key controls identified and documented in a matrix form fit squarely in Family Dollar’s Audit SAS70 compliance plan.
Business Value Delivered
The end result was a successful, on-time project implementation. Perficient was recognized for being the key unifying component that allowed the project to regain its traction and ultimate go-live success. In addition, the client retained Perficient for additional project management work with another key initiative following the success of the equity management implementation.