Customer Success: Siemens

Overview

Siemens is a global electrical engineering and electronics company. Its 360,000 employees develop and manufacture products, design and install complex systems and projects, and tailor a wide range of services for individual requirements.

Challenge

Automate and coordinate global financial period-end close

Siemens’ financial close procedure was labor-intensive and difficult to manage. Individuals were forced to intervene at every step to determine the process status, nudge people, do checks and correct functional and technical problems. Each financial period close was different. Siemens identified the need for a single, enterprise-wide, standardized process. The initial project was for Switzerland. As they began to analyze their close, they initially identified in excess of 700 processes involved. But after an audit by Redwood, they discovered many additional financial close steps that were undocumented yet still performed. This meant that their close was never executed consistently, they had issues with their ability to conduct comprehensive audits and they were always reliant on staff to know the necessary processes required.

Solution

SAP® CPS by Redwood now automates Siemens’ financial close, bringing consistent and high-quality process automation across the company’s entire enterprise. We reduced their financial close from 1,000 manual tasks that were difficult to manage, to just 30 well organized manual tasks, with the remainder all fully automated.