Synopsis
The way senior management sifts the data today has changed dramatically. They no longer want numerical figures in financial reporting but real insights to drive decision making and strategy execution. According to a survey, the finance team spends only 24% of their time analyzing a report. The report suggests that employees spend ample time creating standardized reports that they barely get enough time to evaluate them. A survey by Deloitte enunciates that “51% of the delivery departments have to deliver the same set of data several times.” The survey further states that 50% of managers are not satisfied with the speed of delivery and 54% with the quality of the report. Essentially, preparing a financial statement is a manual and repetitive task, requiring the extraction and collation of data from various sources. Therefore, RPA in Financial Reporting has high scopes.
About the Client
Our client is a globally leading diversified mining company, operating mainly in zinc, lead, silver, Iron ore, oil, and gas. Having spread its presence in PAN India, the company continues to make efforts toward nation-building. As a diversified natural resources organization, the company pledges to reduce carbon emissions.
Key Issue
The client manually garnered approximately 60 raw financial reports from various applications and departments. Using conventional ways of data collection presented a challenge to the client as they employed 10 FTE to complete the task, taking 60 minutes to prepare a single report. Therefore, the client’s goal was to improve process productivity, reduce the turnaround time, and remove manual labor by integrating RPA in Financial Reporting.
Our Solutions
The client realized the need for a digital partner after facing challenges with their traditional ways of creating financial reporting. They partnered with RPATech based on our proven expertise, deep industry knowledge in the domain, and unique customer service delivery. We initiated the automation process by analyzing the client’s As-Is process using our domestic approaches—D3OTM and AugurDTM. Then we assessed possible ways to reduce the number of raw reports, consequently reducing the number from 60 to 7 and removing a human dependency.
RPATech proposed using UiPath’s attended Bot to reduce recurring costs and minimize human intervention from 10 to one person. However, we kept one human checkpoint in the process at the client’s request. So, before the Bot sends the coalesced file to the stakeholders, one assigned user would validate them. As a result of integrating RPA in financial reporting, the client could station their human workforce to more complex and strategic tasks.
Automation Benefits
After the successful integration of RPA in Financial Reporting, the client reaped the following benefits:
- Automation reduced the number of raw reports from 60 to 7.
- Human touchpoint minimized from 10 to 1+ 1 virtual workforce.
- Human workforces were stationed on complex and value-added tasks.
- RPA implementation significantly reduced operational costs.
- Manual laboring was eliminated.
- Deploying Bot in creating Financial Report enhanced the process productivity.
- A time-consuming process turned into a time-efficient one.
