As Santa prepares for his busiest time of the year on Christmas Eve, he has a lot on his plate. But he knows that he has the support of his elves and finely-honed processes perfected over hundreds of years to get everything done. Safe in the knowledge that the Christmas present lists have been received
The financial close continues to weigh heavily on accounting organizations. A typical global close for a large organization today can involve over 100 companies that must be closed before group consolidation, with more than 500 processes per company plus many more sub-processes and hundreds of thousands of SAP-related activities. And all this frenetic activity always
Workload automation (WLA) and scheduling are the workhorses of digital business. Unfortunately, the WLA landscape at many organizations has been built up over time in disconnected silos and layers. Recent analyst research has shown that only 8% of IT leaders believe that they have a unified approach and toolset for automation. At most organizations, core
Who do you call when you’re in the middle of a major project to migrate all your SAP systems and you have just two weeks to replace your central job scheduling tool at the same time? CSM Bakery Solutions was in just that position in April and put out an urgent RFP. The response wasn’t
We asked dairy giant Arla Foods four key questions about the challenges of its month-end close and how to tackle them. The company is the one of the world’s largest dairy companies, selling products in more than 100 countries, with 19,000 employees and revenue of over €10 billion. In the video interview, Arla talks about reducing
Workload automation or scheduling technology will already be running important processes in your business. But it’s unlikely you’ll have a clear understanding of how your organization really uses automation, or what is truly possible using modern workload automation. Over the decades, the workload automation and scheduling technology landscape has evolved with disconnected silos and layers.
In the wake of the ongoing global health crisis, business and IT leaders are looking for ways to improve the resilience of their operations no matter what is thrown at them. So what do organizations need to do to achieve this resilience, while also remaining competitive? An analysis conducted by Harvard Business Review (HBR) of
Hybrid IT is now an approach that is widely used by most companies to effectively manage their businesses operations. But running systems and applications across public and private cloud and on-premises technology brings additional complexity that needs to be managed. For a digital business to be competitive it needs workload automation technology that goes beyond
It’s a long-held misconception that going through the pain and cost of implementing an ERP system — such as SAP or Oracle— across your business will solve all your financial efficiency and automation problems. In reality, while your ERP does tackle some of those issues there are parts it cannot reach. And that leaves you
Reliability and scalability have always been key priorities for IT. With the unprecedented business impacts from COVID-19, they’re requirements. Your services – and your customers—depend on them. Many organizations spend significant time and expense to support the vision of an adaptable, always-on enterprise, and too many struggle to achieve it in spite of that investment.
Regardless of your industry, making the financial close a non-event – faster, more accurate, less stress – has long been the utopia of CFOs everywhere. And there’s good reason for that. Consider, for example, how much cost you would save by shaving even just one day off the time it takes to close the books.
Despite moves to ease the lockdown, no one needs reminding that it’s still far from business as usual. The huge changes to working practices and processes forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the failings of some traditional approaches to finance. As an extension of many organizations’ accounting capabilities, financial shared services is
With the coronavirus crisis putting business as usual on hold, organizations are looking for more resilient ways to manage and reduce IT complexity. This combined with a sudden need to have employees operate remotely from multiple locations means that digital transformation plans are moving faster than ever. A key element in successful digital transformation, according
As CFOs adjust to our changing world, the shortterm focus is understandably on implementing tactical solutions to address the immediate challenges the coronavirus pandemic has created. But it is also imperative for finance leaders to think more strategically about the long-term picture and prepare for a post-COVID-19 world. Technology has been crucial in enabling business
The role of external auditors is ultimately to assess whether an organization’s financial statements are a true and accurate reflection of the performance of the business. In turn that gives stakeholders such as investors and partners confidence in the numbers. But this is no box-ticking exercise. The quality of the audit is paramount, particularly in
If, six months ago, we had tried to predict the biggest business continuity challenge likely to affect your organization over the coming year, I doubt if the current global health pandemic would have made the list. There is, of course, a tragic human cost to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as we adjust to the new
Huge strides have been made in driving inefficiencies out of many financial processes. Yet balance sheet reconciliation is one of the last bastions of reengineering that has seen very little in the way of efficiency gains over the last decade. Traditionally, businesses have long relied on the accountant’s Swiss Army knife, the Excel spreadsheet, in
Several tool providers claim to offer workload automation via SaaS, but, in reality they offer on-premises solutions that have been lifted and shifted to the cloud, without any changes made to take advantage of the inherent benefits of this new approach. Sure, by moving existing workload automation tools to the cloud, organizations take away the
Intercompany elimination is a common barrier to a fast and accurate financial close. For large global organizations operating across multiple geographies and time zones, coordinating all the intercompany activities at month-end quickly becomes complex due to the sheer volume and interdependency of tasks and tight deadlines. The problem is that intercompany accounting still requires enormous
Despite large investments in modern ERP and finance systems, manual processes like journal entry continue to leave businesses exposed to significant human error or fraudulent activities. This ultimately creates the opportunity for the material misstatement of financial results and all the implications that brings. WorldCom is the poster child for these types of financial scandals,
Digital business transformation, defined by Gartner as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model,” requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they operate to become much more agile. Workload automation as a service, delivered via SaaS, provides critical support for this agility by fully exploiting
You’d think that the huge investments your organization has made in its finance and ERP systems would free you up from all sorts of drudgery and save massive amounts of time. In fact, back end accounting processes still require enormous manual effort and intercompany is no exception. Finance teams must plough through the vast quantities
I’ve talked in previous blogs about some of the limitations and barriers of legacy workload automation and job scheduling – how these outdated tools are not only inefficient, unreliable and costly but also how they shackle innovation and investment in digital transformation efforts. One of the major costs of using a mixed bag of legacy
Effective internal controls are the cornerstones of integrity for many organizations’ financial and accounting information, by promoting accountability and preventing fraud. At least that’s what we’ve long been led to believe. Not surprisingly, a huge amount of work goes into ensuring that controls are in place, documented and tested to provide evidence that they are
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