Blog & Newsroom

How Automation and Analytics Help CFOs Rise to the Growing ESG Reporting Challenge

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting is rapidly rising on the corporate agenda as investors look beyond traditional financial performance to evaluate the longer-term growth opportunities and risks for companies. According to a PwC report, institutional investors view ESG as critical to understanding the full risk profile of a company and evaluating how prepared it is for the future. And they want standardized, rigorous data to support their investment decisions. In a CFA Institute survey,

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Accelerating the SAP IBP Supply Chain: 60% Time Savings with Redwood Process Automation

SAP IBP (Integrated Business Planning ) is SAP’s flagship planning product for cloud-based supply chain management, providing functionality for procurement, distribution, and inventory.  SAP IBP consists of several modules that work together to manage data and coordinate supply chain processes. For example, the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) module can generate forecasts for demand, supply, product and portfolio changes, strategic projects, and related financial impact for the upcoming period. These SAP IBP modules depend on data from various upstream SAP systems and modules.

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The Top Considerations When Migrating Workload Automation

You understand the benefits that modern SaaS-based workload automation solution can bring to your organization, and you’re ready to move away from your existing technology. Now it’s time to think about migrating to the new solution. This process can seem daunting, especially if you have a vast inventory of processes built on various on-premises legacy solutions over many years. We at Redwood can help. You may even be surprised at how less daunting the process can be.

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4 Benefits of Automated Rule-Based Controls for Finance and Accounting

Finance needs to perform many controls and checks as part of its accounting and reporting responsibilities, ensuring the numbers accurately reflect the reality of the business. Crucially, finance needs confidence that the figures  recorded in SAP (or any other ERP system) represent what is actually happening in the business? Some examples of accounting controls performed by finance include: End-of-day checks: Have all production orders been closed? Has a manufactured item been moved into stock,

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Is Your Automation Being Crushed by Cloned Processes?

It sounds like something out of a ‘50’s B-movie, but your business could be in danger of being crushed by clones – cloned variants of existing processes that are nearly identical. A simple task like backing up servers can lead to tens of thousands of nearly-identical cloned processes — one for each server — getting in the way and costing you money. How does this happen? Many automation tools require a separate job definition for each variant of a process,

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5 Major Revenue Recognition Risks and How Finance Automation Can Help

Revenue recognition poses significant risks to organizations –  when revenue has been improperly or incorrectly recognized due to error or fraud, potential penalties and reputational damage can occur. In the US for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has detailed guidelines on revenue recognition in its Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 101. The overarching guiding principle is that revenue should not be recognized until it is realized or realizable and earned, which is generally when the following conditions have been met: Persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists Delivery has occurred or services have been rendered The seller’s price to the buyer is fixed and determinable The ability to collect the revenue is reasonably assured However,

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Tackle Technical Debt with Redwood’s RunMyJobs

What do we mean by technical debt in the context of workload automation? It’s an accumulation of quick fix workarounds that build up as a result of the limitations of old and out-of-date legacy scheduling or workload automation tools. These workarounds are called “debt” because they’re compromises that add an ongoing and future burden to the organization that can only be repaid by extra work. Technical debt costs a huge amount of manual effort and time as your best team members become firefighters,

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Arla Foods Automates to Improve Consistency and Frequency of Its Energy Taxes Reconciliation

Global dairy company Arla Foods has automated the reconciliation and settlement of its energy taxes, eliminating administrative work and human error and allowing the organization to complete the process – with greater accuracy – monthly instead of annually. As part of its energy taxes reconciliation process, Arla Foods collects meter readings in Impero from its Danish dairies, along with the utility company invoice data in SAP. These numbers are then compared against the energy taxes that Arla pays up front to identify instances where the company is entitled to a refund.

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Does Your Finance Team Have the Skills to Deliver Digital Transformation?

Digital investments top the CFO agenda for 2021, according to analyst Gartner’s survey of finance leaders. However, the analyst warns that without plugging the digital skills gap in finance, CFOs will struggle to fully benefit from these digital investments in technologies such as advanced analytics, automation and AI. According to Gartner, there are five key digital competencies applicable to finance work. These competencies are technological literacy, digital translation, digital learning and development,

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Jabil Reveals 4 Benefits of Digitizing the Financial Close Process

By Redwood Software Global manufacturing services company Jabil achieved four major benefits by automating and digitizing manual tasks across its month-end close and record-to-report (R2R) process. Using Redwood’s finance automation, Jabil achieved these benefits: Time savings Standardization Data quality Reduction in potential audit fees Speaking in a recent webinar with sharedserviceslink, Scott Barone, director of the finance digital PMO at Jabil, explained that the automation project started by surveying finance teams across both the corporate and individual site functions globally,

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Why it’s Time to Adopt Modern Batch Processing and Workload Orchestration

If you’re still batch processing like you were five—or even two—years ago, it’s time for a change. Batch processing was designed for efficiency and convenience. It’s a method of scheduling groups of jobs (batches) to be processed at the same time – with or without human intervention. Traditionally, batch workloads have been processed during batch windows, which are periods of time when overall CPU usage is low (typically overnight). Why overnight? Batch workloads can require high CPU cycles,

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The Easy Way to Bring Best-of-Breed Apps into Your Processes

As your organization advances through digital transformation, it’s only natural that you want the applications that will drive the changes and improvements to be a good fit with your organization and be the best at what they do. And, as these best-of-breed apps will be crucial to your business operations, they need to be integrated into your process automation capabilities. That can be easier said than done, however. Many automation solutions may not support applications outside a narrow ecosystem without customization,

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How RunMyJobs Makes It Easy to Automate Securely

Automation reduces manual effort, increases efficiency and flexibility, and improves operations. The more systems, processes and data you orchestrate through your automation platform, the bigger the payoff. But these outcomes are only possible if the automation platform is secure. Redwood’s RunMyJobs® SaaS workload automation provides the secure automation modern enterprises need because it is built with security in mind. Here’s how: Secure by design RunMyJobs is uncompromising on security features with its security-first, single-tenant design – in which customers have a singular,

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3 Reasons “Low-Code” Automation Is On the Rise

When automating business processes for your organization, having software that is easy to implement and use will help you to get value faster. You want workload automation that allows everyone in IT to be productive quickly and to have enough confidence in the software to be able to focus on other work that adds more value. There is increasing adoption of “low-code” easy-to-use systems intended for non-technical people, or “citizen developers.” Modern workload automation solutions like Redwood’s RunMyJobs® use these same concepts to simplify the effort in building automated processes.

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Four Areas Where Automation Gives You Business Agility

Your organization needs to be agile. That means responding quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities, and developing business solutions to address them. Modern workload automation supports this business agility by enabling the business processes that make organizations more responsive to customers – both internal and external – and meet their increasing expectations around speed and reliability. There are four areas where automation can provide an important helping hand: Speed of innovation SaaS-based workload automation such as Redwood’s RunMyJobs® makes it easy to build elegant automated business processes.

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Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs)

  What is a Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP)? Isn’t this just another name for workload automation? Not quite. According to Gartner, the term service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) describes workload automation designed for event-driven business models and cloud infrastructure. The idea is that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will drive customer-focused agility by using these platforms as part of their cloud, big data and DevOps initiatives. Gartner forecasts that 80% of organizations using automation tools will switch to SOAPs between now and 2024.

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Automation Predictions for 2021

What do your peers see in the year ahead in the world of process automation and orchestration? From conversations with IT leaders and decades of experience, Redwood shares its outlook for 2021. Cost-reduction remains a priority Regardless of the increasing demands to deliver more reliable, better customer experiences, and investment needed for digital transformation, cost-reduction will remain a significant driver of IT initiatives. Budgets will not be increased and may even decrease in 2021.

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Podcast: How to Ensure Accurate Multi-Level Cost and Revenue Allocations in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at the challenges around cost and revenue allocation in SAP and how to tackle them. This area of finance impacts product pricing and profit margin. It includes the collection of all the multi-level direct and indirect costs that need to be allocated to a cost center and then calculating what portion of that total cost should be attributed to each product or service to be sold.

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Podcast: How to Automate Controls and Validations in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at how to tackle some of the issues around controls and validations for finance processes in SAP. In the podcast, technology writer and editor Andy McCue talks to finance transformation expert Adrian Li, who has more than 20 years’ experience designing, building and running SAP ERP in both large and small organizations and across many industry sectors. Topics covered include: What types of SAP controls and validations there are around finance and associated processes.

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Podcast: How to Achieve Touchless Batch Input Processing in SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance podcasts, we look at how to relieve some pain points for finance and IT around batch processing in SAP. And we discuss how automation can help tackle those problems. In the podcast, technology writer and editor Andy McCue talks to finance transformation expert Adrian Li, who has more than 20 years’ experience designing, building and running SAP ERP in both large and small organizations and across many industry sectors.

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Finance IT: How to Manage Dependencies within SAP®

In this episode from our series of SAP-focused finance automation podcasts, we discuss why it’s a challenge to manage finance process dependencies in SAP and ensure tasks are completed in the correct sequence. In the podcast, writer and editor Andy McCue talks to Adrian Li, a finance transformation expert with more than 20 years’ experience in the design, build and running of SAP ERP in both large and small organizations across many industry sectors. Li explains how the failure to manage dependencies within SAP can have a huge impact on finance processes such as asset depreciation and,

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The SAP® Challenges for Finance and IT

Writer and editor Andy McCue talks to Adrian Li, a finance transformation expert with more than 20 years’ experience in the design, build and running of SAP ERP in both large and small organizations across many industry sectors. In the podcast, Li explains how many of the IT  and automation challenges can be traced back to the original concept and design for SAP more than 40 years ago and how fundamental it is to finance processes in large organizations today.

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The Automation Gap: The 3 Reasons Why Your Finance Processes Are Still Highly Manual

Despite the widespread adoption of ERP systems that were supposed to remove most of the manual effort, only 20% of finance processes are truly automated. Why is that? It’s the automation gap. That gap around finance and accounting processes means work still needs to be done manually outside of those ERP systems, requiring additional tools or extensive ERP customization. This results in a compromise – either accept a lower level of finance process automation and fill the gaps with manual work,

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How Automotive Parts Supplier Faurecia Automated 80% of Key Finance Processes

How did leading global automotive parts supplier Faurecia – which has its equipment in 1 in 3 cars worldwide – automate 80% of its finance processes, with approval workflow the only remaining manual task? Watch the video to hear Christophe MacGarry, global finance transformation director at Faurecia, explain how the company worked with Redwood to implement a global platform for finance automation. Faurecia is using that platform to support the transformation of its global business shared services (GBS) and improve SAP utilization across all of the countries in which it operates.

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