This is a very vague question but one of the most frequently asked questions. Most, if not all treasury workstation vendors answer this vaguely as well. The answer could range from few weeks to several months (read years) but everything depends on how complex your needs are. So essentially, the onus is back on the cash manager who is trying to get a new system for his organization. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with that answer. Agreed that it does not really answer the question but then again there are so many things that need to come together for a treasury workstation to work.
Let us look at those several things that need to come together for a classical treasury workstation to work.
The first one and possibly the most important one is the ability to connect with banks, get the prior, current and intra-day files. If your banking relationship is with say 10 banks then there is certainly a possibility that it will take a while to setup communications, do the one hour calls with technology teams daily, test if a file can be sent over FTP. you know the drill. The single most important factor that may help speed up this process lies within your treasury workstation, answer these questions and you will know- How robust is the BAI file processor? If you try to import a BAI file from another bank, how long will it take you to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of that bank? How easy is it to setup file transfer with a new bank? How easily can you use schedulers? If your cash management solution does all of that, then you should be up and running in a couple of months, at least this part should not take several months and years. The answer is Technology and how well your treasury workstation uses it. Most banks do take a long time to setup anything, could be several weeks to months but you can at least be prepared at your end, ensuring that your treasury workstation does not add to the timeline. Then again, how many organizations need to connect to 10 different banks to create a cash position?
The next one would be incoming and outgoing forecasts, How easy is it to get forecasts from your electronic funds transfer system, your debt management system and say echobacks from your bank in response to bulk payments and from an accounting system? The answers, there are two here - Standards and Technology. if all communication to and from you system is based on a standard, there is no work to be done at the treasury workstation end. What if our systems do not support the latest standards yet? The answer is Technology, that technology has come a long way now and that a team working with any product, be it accounting systems or payments systems should be able to easily output data in a certain specified schema in very less time, I mean in the order of 2-6 weeks with testing and testing again. One other thing to consider in the interest of time is if your treasury solution is available as a hosted solution (SaaS, ASP, hosted at a data center)? If it is, then there is very limited installation or setup time for these interfaces.
Then there is reporting. The answer here is Technology again. Does you treasury workstation have a robust ad-hoc reporting tool? If it does, virtually no time has to be spent creating those tens of reports; your users can create, save, print and export them as they need it.
Finally, I am assuming that all workstations provide basic cash reconciliation and positioning services. Again, if the underlying technology is robust and not a mix and match of multiple products and out-dated technologies, chances are that your treasury workstation can accommodate minor changes to say your cash management dashboard or add some additional information you need to the payment screens easily. All of these major setup tasks can be done in parallel, so should it really take 6 months or 2 years to implement a treasury workstation?
During the last couple of years, we have been through these issues ourselves. We have rewritten and updated our technology stack continuously over this period, especially true in the last 6 months. The only truth about technology is that it changes, almost often for the better. We are trying to keep up with it, the best we can. So the next time you ask the question about timeline for implementation of a treasury workstation, check the answers to see if technology and lack of standards is holding you back.