Blog & Newsroom

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 up front 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

By Redwood Software 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 Redwood’s finance automation, Jabil achieved these benefits: 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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The Easy Way to Bring Best-of-Breed Apps into Your Processes

As your organization advances through digital transformation, it’s only natural that you want the applications that will drive the changes and improvements to be a good fit with your organization and be the best at what they do. And, as these best-of-breed apps will be crucial to your business operations, they need to be integrated into your process automation capabilities. That can be easier said than done, however. Many automation solutions may not support applications outside a narrow ecosystem without customization,

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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 Redwood’s RunMyJobs® use these same concepts to simplify the effort in building automated processes.

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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 innovation SaaS-based workload automation such as Redwood’s RunMyJobs® makes it easy to build elegant automated business processes.

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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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Automation Predictions for 2021

What do your peers see in the year ahead in the world of process automation and orchestration? From conversations with IT leaders and decades of experience, Redwood shares its outlook for 2021. Cost-reduction remains a priority Regardless of the increasing demands to deliver more reliable, better customer experiences, and investment needed for digital transformation, cost-reduction will remain a significant driver of IT initiatives. Budgets will not be increased and may even decrease in 2021.

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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’ 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 1 in 3 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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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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