everis implements award-winning New Treasury Solution at Utilities Global Giant
For the third consecutive year, everis obtained recognition for its innovative projects based on cutting-edge digital transformation technology. On this occasion, its New Treasury System solution —implemented at Utilities Global Giant— received the Bronze Award in the “Business Transformation” category in the 2018 edition of the SAP Quality Awards, an annual prize bestowed on corporations and other organizations in Spain and Portugal that rewards best-in-class project excellence in the implementation of SAP systems alongside other technologies.
Challenge
A world-leading energy and utilities company in terms of capitalization needed to undertake the global implementation of all the group’s treasury-related processes in the corporate ERP, which involved:
- 2,600 users
- 2.2 million annual banking transactions
- More than 1.2 million payment transactions
All integrated with the company’s different commercial systems.
To achieve this, the company engaged everis as its transformation & technology partner.
Roadmap
- Intelligent treasury. Incorporate Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for efficient reconciliation.
- Open finance. APIfication of corporate processes to improve relations with group companies and third parties.
- Digital finance. Digitalization and optimization of the group’s corporate processes.
- Intra-group financing. Process traceability and immutability.
- End-to-end process automation on SAP ERP. Incorporating all the other types of financial, operating conditions, market curves and analytics for decision-making.
- Blockchain as a service. Leverage the investment made in the extension and improvement of other processes (management of proxies, syndicated loans, management of guarantees,…).
On this basis, we needed to design a solution aimed at:
- Improving productivity.
- Expediting the financing process, reducing lead time from weeks or months to days.
- Lowering operating costs.
- Harmonizing processes.
- Proving technological innovation.
Solution and implementation
Disruption is a word we continue to hear in the context of technology. Many industries are changing rapidly because of ongoing disruptive innovation. At everis we support our clients through this change. We help our clients to improve their business results by taking advantage of disruption and adding value through new ecosystems, service models and solutions.
One such disruptive technology is Blockchain. Since its Bitcoin beginnings in 2009, Blockchain technology has become the basis for creating secure and transparent transactional applications to streamline business processes in organizations across the world.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), also known as Blockchain technology, consists of an open and distributed database that serves as a ledger where digital transaction records are stored, which is geographically spread across several devices on a peer-to-peer network. This database can be configured in a blockchain system, which can be either public or private, in which data are stored in blocks protected by cryptography.
We needed to digitalize revolving-type intercompany financing, a process that involves formalizing, signing and filing loan contracts. To this end, the solution implemented by everis consisted of:
- Process re-engineering and streamlining of communication among the different actors (group companies, proxies, treasury authorizer, tax/legal department, treasury manager).
- Implementing Blockchain on SAP Leonardo —a digital platform which makes it possible to leverage the technology on top of business data— to digitalize, expedite and automate the intra-group financing workflow. Enabling real-time information exchange in a secure, transparent, traceable, agile and cheaper fashion.
- Developing a multi-device web application and integration with SAP Leonardo.
- Generating the draft/final contract in PDF and digital signature.
However, digital transformation is different for every company and everis is aware of that. The same change model cannot be applied to all companies, since context, strategy, priorities and needs vary. Therefore, in order to ensure the successful outcome of the project, a change management office was created, which was very positively valued by both finance and IT teams.
Benefits of the New Treasury Solution
The New Treasury Model implemented at the company has unlocked significant benefits in efficiency and scalability of the company’s treasury management processes, as well as contributing to eliminate operating risk and cut process execution costs, thereby improving reliability and accessibility to management information.
We set out to, and achieved, the following benefits for our client:
- End-to-end digitalization of the process. Improved, multi-device, user-friendly interface.
- Process traceability. From loan request to custody in SAP.
- Evolution towards a digital treasury. Innovating in corporate processes.
- Security and transparency. Over the SAP Blockchain network.
But beyond digital transformation, streamlining these cumbersome processes, cutting costs and contributing to the company’s bottom-line success are values in themselves. Our pioneering strategy was geared towards reinforcing the strategic and innovative positioning of the finance function, and the company is currently evaluating in what other areas this innovation can be replicated.
This is a clear example of how Finance can lead the transformation of its traditional function by implementing innovative technology to optimize financial processes.
