Automation for finance & accounting and reporting functions delivers an estimated annual saving of US $5.6M

Challenge

The client wanted to rationalize and standardize processes related to finance, accounting, and reporting. The standardization would assist over 5,000 employees at 20 locations across North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia to function more efficiently. The client decided to leverage automation to improve productivity, consistency, and efficiency and to lower process costs through optimization.

“With industries evolving and technologies advancing, there is an increasing potential for technology to be the transformative force and drive business success. In our client’s case, automation played such a role in their finance and accounting processes that resulted in significant savings. Besides automation, Marlabs’ deeper understanding of the customer challenges, our extensive experience with automation, and our tailored solutions to the individual client needs provided great flexibility and scalability required for their business.”

Solution

Domain and technology experts at Marlabs examined 39 end-to-end use cases related to finance, accounting, and reporting. These included commission calculator and reconciliation, bid support process, accounts receivable, accounts payable, order processing, sale management, order backlog management, and pricing, among others. The results of the study showed an opportunity to automate processes that cost the client more than US$40 M.

A deep dive into the top and critical six processes of the 39 showed a potential to address costs of more than US$24 M. After a thorough ROI and prioritization analysis of the potential 6 processes, Marlabs automated three of the six processes to kickstart leveraging automation to improve productivity and unlock savings  for these processes. The three processes optimized using robotic process automation (RPA) driven by business rules included:

• Bid Support Process: The bid support process involved the execution of 300+ rules to arrive at ideal pricing. Automation eliminated the manual effort of going through the rules, thus reducing the processing time by 75% and improving process accuracy.
• Contract Settlement: The contract settlement team was responsible for reviewing contract renewal documents averaging 20 pages per contract.  This involved considerable time and manual effort. Automation reduced the manual processing time by 50% and reduced human error by over 45%.
• Commission Calculation and Reconciliation: The billing management team processed and closed commissions on deals for salespersons within 30 days. The automation reduced manual effort by over 95% resulting in faster pay-outs and increased sales representative satisfaction by 75%.

Results

Applying automation to large-volume, repetitive, and rules-driven processes in accounting, finance, and reporting functions is an ideal investment, guaranteed to improve process velocity, improve accuracy, reduce costs, and eliminate the need for human supervision.

The automation engine is also available on demand and can be scaled to meet unusual or unexpected spikes in volumes. Here, it delivered an estimated annual saving of US$5.6 M. If the client pursues the initiative to leverage RPA in its finance, accounting, and reporting functions, an additional estimated US$32.8 M could be unlocked in savings and other benefits such as below.

Impact

• $5.6 million in savings annually
• 75% reduction in processing time for bid support process
• 45% reduction in human error for contract settlement
• 95% reduction in manual effort for commission pay-outs
• 75% increase in sales representative satisfaction