Serco Increases Efficiencies and Reduces Risk by Automating Reconciliation & Financial Close Processes with SAP and Trintech
Key Takeaways
⇨ Challenge and Solution: Serco faced inefficiencies with manual financial processes and risk management. Partnering with Trintech, they implemented Cadency, automating financial close and reconciliation tasks, which significantly improved accuracy and reduced risk.
⇨ Results: The automation led to increased efficiency with fewer reconciliations, real-time risk visibility, and a reduction in manual tasks. Serco now processes 5,000 reconciliations monthly and auto-matches 15,000 accounts, saving 500 hours per month.
⇨ Future Plans: Serco aims to further enhance their finance function by exploring Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to achieve even greater process efficiencies and cost-effectiveness, continuing their commitment to becoming a world-class finance function.
The Roll-Out
Serco achieved a very successful implementation of Cadency and contributes the seamless roll-out to a few factors. “There are many different factors to consider in the implementation process and getting just one wrong could be the reason a project are at risk or fail. This includes not fully understanding the original requirement, scale/complexity of the change, speed of implementation, lack of executive support, insufficient project governance, lack of training, resistance to change, lack of technical expertise, etc. We made sure we were aligned across the business before we embarked on this transformation which was critical to the success.”
As Serco continued to build upon their finance strategy, they decided to outsource several of their F&A processes to accenture, a leading BPO provider. “What we have seen in the past is many large multinational companies have outsourced parts of their F&A function and it was typically limited to tasks like transactional processing. However, in recent years, the scope of the outsourced work has increased,” explained Adams.”
Risk-Enabled Automation
Today, Serco is running 5,000 balance sheet reconciliations through Cadency on a monthly basis. To gain even further efficiencies, Serco also utilizes Trintech’s SAP connector.
“This connector automatically interfaces data flows from our SAP instance into Cadency so our team can begin analyzing it within minutes. Having the direct interface from SAP also gives confidence in the data matching between the two systems,” said Adams.
Serco has also seen success in leveraging automation for its transaction matching process. “Today, we auto-match 15,000 accounts which has saved us a total of 500 hours per month.”
ROI Achieved
Automation has not only reduced Serco’s cost but also allows their team to focus on more value-added tasks. “Competition for talent is a big focus and challenge for many organizations today,” continued Adams.
“Automation can help retain your resources by allowing them to focus on value-added tasks instead of the manual, transactional processes.” Not only does technology help retain your talent, but it also helps when churn does happen. “What we have seen in the past is that process or system knowledge gets lost when people leave the organization. By having all the processes standardized and documented within Cadency, you reduce the risk of that tacit knowledge walking out the door when people leave.”
From a reporting perspective, Serco’s leadership team now has full visibility into a Reporting dashboard that allows them to drill-down into any account and identify risk on the balance sheet. ”
