Steel manufacturer automates financial and business processes to gain a competitive edge

Company Overview

ArcelorMittal, the world’s leading steel and mining company, has 168,000 employees, a presence in 60 countries and steelmaking facilities in 17 countries. Annual crude steel production totals 71.5 million metric tonnes, with iron ore production reaching 58 million metric tonnes. The company’s goal is to be the steel company of the future by helping build a better world with smarter, stronger, cleaner, reusable steels.

Business Challenge

In the highly commoditized and competitive steel market, ArcelorMittal knew that price was its only significant differentiator. To achieve an edge over its competitors, ArcelorMittal had to drive efficiencies and cost savings across every single aspect of its production and processes.

By centralizing offshore activities in six Shared Services Centers (SSCs), ArcelorMittal had maxed out the process efficiencies through standardization of close activities.

The company knew there was a limit to the cost savings that could be reached due to the commitment to manual processes by the remaining six SSCs.

While consolidating the six SSCs into a single, central SSC would have boosted efficiency and reduced costs, ArcelorMittal had no choice but to identify alternative solutions that would be acceptable to the labor unions.

Solution

ArcelorMittal selected Redwood Finance Automation because of the platform’s focus on optimization, automation and financial control.

Results

Redwood’s automation strategically targeted optimization to help ArcelorMittal maximize its financial control and significantly reduced costs to better differentiate itself in a highly competitive marketplace.

ArcelorMittal also standardized processes and realized a range of efficiencies across the global business.

Redwood’s built-in audit and governance capabilities offer the transparency and traceability required by ArcelorMittal’s various stakeholders.

The company relied on Redwood to automate preparation steps and eliminate reconciliations as well as manual activities related to the record to report (R2R) and other financial processes.

Processes automated for ArcelorMittal include:

• GR/IR
• Intercompany
• Stock in transit reporting
• Doubtful debt provision
• Journal entry management
• Payment approval and processing
• DSO and cash planning
• Rule based controls
• Sub-ledger and other reconciliations
• Automated SAP closing transactions
• Audit reporting
• Closing calendar

The platform automated the company’s inconsistent business processes and replaced them with standardized actions that are repeated for every single close. As expected, this greatly improves the quality of the data and accelerates each close. In addition to the cost and time efficiencies, the automation also freed up shared services finance and accounting teams to focus on value added activities that make better use of their abilities.