Replacing a legacy financial system at an organization as operationally complex as the NAC required navigating a broad and interdependent set of challenges simultaneously:

• Unsupported legacy infrastructure: The existing financial system had passed end-of-life with no upgrade path available, creating mounting operational risk and limiting the organization’s ability to meet modern financial management standards.
• Manual process dependency: In the absence of system automation, Finance staff relied on effort-intensive workarounds that introduced error exposure and reduced capacity for analytical work.
• Distributed financial workloads: Financial responsibilities extended well beyond the Finance Department. Programming, production, catering, parking, and infrastructure teams all required real-time access to the financial data specific to their operations, a capability the legacy platform could not support.
• Multi-entity complexity: The NAC and the NAC Foundation operate as separate legal entities while sharing staff and systems, requiring the new platform to compartmentalize financial data, reporting, and controls across distinct organizational units.
• Integration requirements: The new system needed to integrate with Ceridian Dayforce for payroll and HR data synchronization and with a CRM platform still under selection, while establishing a standardized data model to support cross-platform analysis in Power BI.
• Bilingualism obligations: As a federal Crown corporation, the NAC required all training and support materials to be delivered in English and French, adding a documentation and delivery dimension to every change management workstream.
• Stakeholder breadth: Defining requirements demanded structured consultation across more than a dozen departments, from commercial revenue-generating units and six artistic programming departments through to corporate functions including HR, IT, procurement, and marketing.
• Adoption risk: A transformation of this scope carried real risk of low user adoption if change management, training, and knowledge transfer activities were not tightly coordinated with the technical implementation from the start.

What the NAC needed was a partner capable of managing the full implementation lifecycle while building the internal organizational capability to operate and sustain the solution independently after go-live.

Our Solution

Bronson structured the engagement across tightly coordinated workstreams addressing technical implementation, business process transformation, data governance, and organizational readiness in parallel.

1. Project Governance and Initiation

Bronson established a formal project governance structure in close collaboration with the NAC, defining roles, escalation paths, risk and issue management protocols, and communication standards. Joint kick-off sessions aligned the full combined team on methodology, key terminology, and delivery expectations before detailed design work began.

2. Requirements Gathering and Future-State Design

Working with subject matter experts across commercial, programming, and administrative departments, Bronson facilitated structured consultations to translate NAC operational requirements into detailed functional specifications. These specifications formed the basis for validated future-state business process documentation and a confirmed technical architecture before any configuration activity commenced.

3. Phased SaaS Platform Configuration

Bronson configured the selected SaaS financial solution to support the NAC’s full range of financial management requirements, including management accounting, revenue accounting, accounts payable, project accounting, general accounting, internal controls, and financial reporting. Configuration was executed in phased sprints, implementing higher-priority processes first to deliver early value and allow for iterative stakeholder feedback before subsequent sprints began.

4. Systems Integration Architecture

Bronson designed and built integrations between the financial platform and Ceridian Dayforce for payroll and HR data synchronization, and established the data architecture required to support a future CRM integration. A standardized cross-platform data model was implemented to support reporting and analysis in Microsoft Power BI, enabling the aggregation of data across the financial, HR, and CRM environments.

5. Historical Data Migration

Bronson led the full data migration program, converting a minimum of one year of transactional history from the legacy NAC financial system along with complete vendor and customer records. The NAC team managed record identification and data cleansing, with Bronson owning all mapping, staging, and load activities into the production environment.

6. Structured Testing Program

Bronson executed a multi-phase testing program encompassing unit testing, component integration testing, system integration testing, and performance testing. All test activity was governed by a formal Test Strategy and a suite of functional test scripts directly traceable to business requirements, with user acceptance testing conducted as a joint activity with the NAC team.

7. Organizational Change Management

Bronson developed and implemented a bilingual change management strategy designed to transition NAC staff from the legacy system to the new platform with minimal operational disruption. Activities included stakeholder engagement planning, organizational readiness assessments, and a proactive communications plan synchronized with the project delivery schedule.

8. Bilingual Training and Knowledge Transfer

Bronson developed a bilingual end-user training curriculum and delivered Train the Trainer sessions to NAC internal trainers, enabling the organization to scale training delivery across departments independently. Comprehensive knowledge transfer activities ensured that NAC administrators were fully equipped to operate, maintain, and evolve the solution after go-live.

9. Go-Live Cutover and Stabilization

Bronson managed a structured go-live process, including dry-run cutover testing, a detailed Go-Live Checklist, and a quarterly stabilization period during which the NAC operated the new system in parallel with legacy processes. This parallel operation validated monthly and quarterly reporting and close activities before final cutover to production.

Key Deliverables

• Project Management Plan – A comprehensive governance document defining project schedule, milestones, deliverable descriptions, resource assignments, quality management, risk and issue protocols, and communications standards.

• Solution Detailed Design Document – Technical architecture documentation specifying all solution components, configurations, integrations, and data models at implementation level, including visual representations of architecture, data model, and user experience.
• Detailed Functional Requirements – Structured requirements documentation capturing operational needs across all NAC departments, fully traceable through design, configuration, testing, and acceptance phases.
• To-Be Business Process Maps – End-to-end process documentation for all new and impacted financial functions, validated by NAC stakeholders and used as the foundation for solution configuration and end-user training materials.

The Impact

Bronson’s engagement delivered a fully operational, modern financial platform that addressed the NAC’s most pressing operational constraints and established a durable foundation for financial management at scale.

• The NAC replaced an unsupported, end-of-life system with a vendor-maintained SaaS platform, eliminating the operational and compliance risks associated with running legacy financial software indefinitely.

• Departmental users across programming, commercial, and administrative functions gained access to near real-time financial performance data relevant to their specific operations, enabling timely and informed decision making at the business unit level.
• Integration with Ceridian Dayforce established a single source of truth for payroll and HR data within the financial system, eliminating duplicate data entry and the reconciliation effort it generated.
• A standardized data model supporting Power BI reporting positioned the NAC to conduct multi-platform analysis across its financial, HR, and CRM environments from a common data foundation.
• Bilingual training and change management delivery met the NAC’s federal bilingualism obligations and supported broad-based adoption across all departments and user populations.
• The parallel stabilization period and structured cutover methodology gave the NAC documented evidence of reliable system performance across a full monthly and quarterly reporting cycle before final legacy decommissioning.

The engagement represented a foundational transformation for the NAC’s financial operations, replacing a fragile, manually-intensive environment with a modern, integrated, and scalable platform. Beyond the technical delivery, the structured approach to knowledge transfer and organizational change management ensured the NAC retained the internal capability to operate and evolve the solution independently.