Blog & Newsroom

Modern automation for utilities: How to optimize meter-to-cash and streamline revenue flow

As a modern utility, you face a growing number of challenges — rising consumer expectations, evolving technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, the always-growing complexities of regulatory compliance and more. But meeting these challenges isn’t impossible. It just requires a commitment to evolve and incorporate the best automation solutions for your particular requirements.  Undertaking an automation initiative for utilities starts with mapping out its unique processes, specifically around meter-to-cash. By optimizing automation of this end-to-end process,

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Increased tax authority scrutiny puts transfer pricing compliance in the potlight

Multinational corporations face compliance challenges in 2021 as intercompany agreements and transfer pricing come under increased scrutiny by hawkish tax authorities. The OECD estimates intra-group transfers make up more than 60% of world trade, underlining why tax authorities globally are taking greater enforcement to prevent intercompany transfer pricing being used to reduce the tax burden of the parent company. The underlying arms-length principle of transfer pricing is that the price should be at a fair market price,

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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 Software 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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5 major revenue recognition risks and how finance automation can help

Improper revenue recognition poses significant risks to organizations. Whether it’s due to unintentional error or deliberate accounting fraud, incorrect revenue recognition can lead to financial penalties, regulatory scrutiny and lasting reputational damage. As regulatory frameworks tighten and stakeholder expectations rise, companies must proactively address vulnerabilities in their revenue recognition processes. This is where finance automation can play a pivotal role. The importance of revenue recognition Revenue recognition is one of the most critical aspects of financial reporting,

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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 upfront 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

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 Finance Automation by Redwood, Jabil achieved: 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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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. RunMyJobs by Redwood is a SaaS workload automation that 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,

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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 RunMyJobs by Redwood,

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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 innovationSaaS-based workload automation,

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The rise of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs)

Automation technology is ever-evolving. One of the latest developments in the world of enterprise automation is the growing importance of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). This isn’t simply another name for workload automation solutions (WLA solutions). Rather, Gartner® describes a SOAP as a workload automation platform designed for event-driven business models and cloud infrastructure. Infrastructure and operations leaders (I&O leaders) can use these advanced tools to drive customer-focused agility to support their cloud,

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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 of 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 one in three 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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The CIO’s guide to finance automation and why it matters

What are the biggest challenges for CIOs today when it comes to meeting the needs of the modern finance function? The reality is that the current finance IT landscape of most large organizations is sub-optimal. It’s a costly and complex mix of ERP systems, workflow engines, point solutions and RPA tools — plus a lot of human effort on top to plug the gaps. According to APQC’s general accounting process framework, almost all key finance processes require additional work outside of the ERP.

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Automation lessons from the financial close front line

The often-frenetic activity of financial close processes is largely due to the huge amount of manual effort they entail every month or quarter. To reduce the pressure and risk this brings, there is an answer for finance departments: Use automation across the close. Done effectively, this can mean the financial close becomes a non-event. And it also allows finance staff to focus on essential analysis to provide essential insights that can improve broader business performance. In the recent “How to make the financial close a non-event”

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