Blog & Newsroom

Podcast: What is the Finance Automation Gap and How Do You Plug It?

In this episode from our series of finance podcasts, we discuss the so-called ‘automation gap’ for finance and accounting, and the problems it causes. In the podcast, writer and editor Andy McCue talks to Devin Gharibian-Saki, chief solution officer at Redwood, about what causes this finance automation gap, what the impact of that is on both finance and IT and, more importantly, how to plug it. Listen to the full podcast to find out: Why plugging the automation gap is critical to achieving the wider CFO goal of elevating the role of finance from number crunching to a strategic adviser to the business Why a huge amount of the work involved in finance processes still has to be done outside of ERP systems How adding point solutions to automate each individual finance process not only adds cost and complexity for IT,

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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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Is Your Finance Team Getting the Most out of Automation?

Even if your finance department uses some form of automation, it’s likely that the financial period-end close will continue to weigh heavily on your accounting staff. The financial period-end close is critical to trust, financial visibility and regulatory compliance. But for a large organization, a typical global close can involve more than 100 companies that must be closed before group consolidation can take place, each with more than 500 processes, along with many more sub-processes. With so much activity taking place within the last few days of each month,

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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. If 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.

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How to Escape the Misery of Maintenance

It can often feel like keeping your day-to-day automated business processes running is a major source of disruption and pain, especially when it comes time for an upgrade. Why is upgrading and maintaining your automation systems so stressful? It shouldn’t be. The problem with most automation tools is that you’re responsible for everything about them. You own their full technology stack, from networking, storage, servers and operating systems through to automation data and client applications. .

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How Santa Takes the Stress out of Christmas

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 and processed, and that the toys will be produced and delivered like clockwork, Santa can focus on readying his reindeer and preparing the sleigh for the big night ahead.

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How to Eliminate Manual Effort and Stress and Make Your Financial Close a Non-Event

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 happens within the last few days of every month. It’s no surprise that the biggest concern, according to 97% of CFOs in a survey by FSN Research,

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Close the Automation Gap: Uncover the Real Cost of Outdated Automation

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 IT processes that support the business are automated using a combination of multiple legacy WLA and scheduling tools that are an average age of 24 years old.

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CSM Bakery Solutions Successfully Migrates Its SAP Job Scheduling to RunMyJobs® Workload Automation

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 great. Most job scheduling and workload automation companies either didn’t respond at all or said they couldn’t help. That’s when Redwood stepped up with our RunMyJobs® SaaS workload automation.

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Arla Foods Answers Four Key Questions About Its Month-End Close Challenges

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 the time to close the books, the importance of having an overview of the month-end tasks and the challenges presented by the amount of close-related work,

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Do You Use Automation to Its Full Potential?

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. As a result, recent analyst research suggests that only 8% of IT leaders believe they have a unified approach to automation.

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Future-Proof Your IT Ops Now

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 the companies that flourished following the last three recessions found that the companies that emerged in the strongest shape “relied less on layoffs to cut costs and leaned more on operational improvements”

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Reboot Automation for Hybrid IT: Service Orchestration and Automation via SaaS

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 the traditional capabilities of legacy workload or scheduling tools if it is to effectively deal with the range of locations of systems and applications and the growing number of technology types being used.

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How to plug the Finance Automation Gap That ERP Alone Cannot Reach

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 with a clear efficiency and automation gap for today’s complex finance and accounting processes. For their many powerful capabilities, ERP systems are designed to support rather than eliminate manual tasks.

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Automation as a Service Delivers the Best Customer Experiences

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. Time consumed by workarounds, patches, and daily management, and costs for on-premises hardware and licensing can quickly spiral out of control.

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How To Start Making Your Financial Close a Non-Event Today – With Standardized and Automated Finance Processes

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. Research into the financial close by analyst Hackett Group shows that top performers close their ledgers earlier in the month and complete the process in less time than others in their peer group.

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The Evolution of Financial Shared Services – From Labor Arbitrage and Cost Reduction to Value Delivery

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 far from immune to this increased scrutiny, with the current situation prompting questions about how smarter approaches are now needed more than ever before.

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Workload Automation is the Next Step for Digital Transformation

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 to Dan Twing, president of Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™), is the modernization of “the IT tooling used to develop applications and manage the IT infrastructure.” This is where workload automation and job scheduling come in.

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Preparing for the New Normal: Four Priorities for CFOs in a Post-COVID-19 World

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 continuity and new ways of working through the crisis. It only serves to highlight that the future is most definitely digital.

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How to Prevent a Bad Audit: Four Things You Need to Address

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 light of high-profile cases where auditors have been fined for failing to identify fraud or financial misstatement that they should have spotted.

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COVID-19 Forces Finance Transformation Back to the Top of the CFO Agenda

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 status quo, businesses are also being forced to rapidly adapt to new ways of working, extraordinary workforce challenges and unprecedented levels of uncertainty and instability.

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Throw Out the Manual. Why Auto-Certification Is Key to Faster and More Accurate Balance Sheet Reconciliation

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 conjunction with email, workflow systems and shared folders to help with the balance sheet reconciliation process. But it’s an approach that is fraught with problems and often fails to solve underlying issues.

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Purpose Built for SaaS: What It Means for Business

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 burden of running the software on an in-house datacenter, but the tools themselves still have the same limiting legacy architecture that causes headaches for businesses and IT.

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Five Ways to Identify Intercompany Differences Earlier and Drive a Faster Close

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 manual effort to reconcile, adjust and record transactions, despite large investments in ERP and finance systems. In fact, 40% of senior finance professionals say difficulties in reconciliations and intercompany agreement is what delays the reporting process the most,

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