For credit union executives planning a core banking systemconversion, feelings of fear and stress are common.

Throw another factor into the mix, like a merger, and theconversion process becomes that much more overwhelming andcomplex.

The $1.5 billion Stanford FCU in Palo Alto, Calif., and the $681million FirstCommunity FCU in Parchment, Mich., said they were able to sailthrough their core system conversions. Both give substantial creditto their hiring of Samaha Associates, a consulting firm in ChinoHills, Calif., that specializes in credit union core systemconversions.

Stanford FCU said it was gearing up to move from an old,outdated system onto one from Open Solutions Inc., and enlistedSamaha Associates’ help throughout the conversion process, mainlyfor the management of third party interfaces, batch jobs andforms.

First Community FCU faced a uniquely challenging situation. Itplanned to convert from a Fiserv system onto a Symitar system andhad just merged two credit unions, each of which ran on twodifferent systems of their own. This essentially left the creditunion with three projects: convert its Fiserv system onto Symitar,convert the merged credit unions’ systems onto Symitar, and managethird party vendor interfaces for all three.

Samaha Associates came in to assist with the credit union’scontract negotiation process with Symitar and saw the conversionprocess through to its end, according to the credit union.

Sabeh Samaha, president/CEO of Samaha Associates, describes hisfirm’s consulting process as meticulous and personalized. His teamoffers credit unions assistance throughout their entire core systemconversion processes, from the vendor selection period up throughgo-live day. Depending on the credit union’s needs, they may onlyhelp with certain parts of the process, Samaha said.

When his team helps a credit union begin investigating vendorand system options, Samaha Associates sit down with the staff todiscuss their needs in depth and come up with a list of 1,000questions to ask potential vendors.

“The credit union needs to understand which vendor is the bestone for them, but we believe they also need to understandthemselves, and from that understanding, find the best fit, ”Samahasaid. “The amount of energy they spend on finding the right vendorshould be the same as the amount of energy they spend onself-discovery.”

Samaha Associates said it helps its clients narrow their coresystem vendor pools down to two or three top choices, then bringsthe top vendors in for interviews and demos. Next, the consultingteam and credit union look for gaps in the vendors’ systems, fillout scorecards for each system and make a final decision.

Samaha said some of the most common fears credit unions havegoing into a core system conversion are that they will suffer asystem outage, be prevented from working on other projects andexhaust their staff.

Stanford FCU said it didn’t need Samaha Associates’ help inevery stage of its conversion. The credit union had already chosenOpen Solutions Inc. as its vendor and had a firm grasp on how tomanage the process. Instead, it primarily needed assistance withsmaller details, said Jim Phillips, senior vice president and chiefinformation officer at Stanford FCU.

“We needed a consultant to go beyond just managing meetings,”Phillips said. “I liked Samaha Associates because they were readyto change our game plan and brought in different resources forus.”

The consulting team specifically worked on managing andorganizing third-party reporting extracts and interfaces,automating batch jobs and managing internal and external forms forthe credit union. Stanford FCU also completed a mock conversionduring the month prior to their official go-live day, as well asidentified and addressed all potential snags ahead of time,Phillips said.

Robert Moore, information technology manager for FirstCommunity, said after merging two credit unions–Education FirstCredit Union of Detroit, Mich., and First American Credit Union ofBeloit, Wis.,–in a two-year time period, the credit union chose notto convert the merged credit unions’ core systems onto FirstCommunity’s existing Fiserv system since they already planned toswitch to a completely new system in the near future.

First Community began looking for a consultant after narrowingits vendor search down to a few options. Moore said he liked thefact that Samaha Associates didn’t require the credit union tostart their search process over again.

Aside from helping First Community with their vendor contractnegotiation process and overseeing the conversion, Moore saidSamaha Associates conducted a gap analysis to pinpoint all thedifferences between the credit union’s old systems and the Symitarsystem, as well as managed its third party vendorrelationships.

“Our management staff had never been in that kind of asituation, so they were going in blind,” Moore said. “Then webrought in the consultant and they gave us a ton ofconfidence.”

Moore said after working with Samaha Associates for 16 months,the credit union executed a flawless conversion without any majormember-facing hiccups. The biggest lesson Moore said he learnedwhile working with Samaha is that it’s definitely worth it to spendample time identifying and solving issues that could potentiallycrop up before the actual conversion begins.

“All of the legwork we did in advance really paid off,” he said.“We put a lot of hours in beforehand for due diligence and testing.The phrase Sabeh used during the pre-work process was, ‘searchingfor the Murphy’s.’”