Global automotive supplier automates 80% of monthly, manual journal entries

Company overview

A top-ten global automotive parts supplier, Forvia technology is found in one in three vehicles worldwide. Faurecia is focused on shaping the next generation of mobility and creating personalized experiences for the cockpit of the future. Its business groups include Forvia Seating, Forvia Interiors, Interior Modules, Forvia Clarion Electronics and Forvia Clean Mobility.

Business challenges

Forvia wanted to boost efficiency, drive down costs and strengthen internal controls and compliance while eliminating internal business silos by automating manual tasks and achieving end-to-end process automation.

To help achieve those goals, the company implemented an integrated ERP system. They reduced the number of IT shared services from 25 to five regional platforms. They also launched a new Global Business Shared Services (GBS) organization to transform and automate its administrative processes, including finance, purchase administration, sales administration and HR payroll.

Globally, more than 1,100 GBS professionals manage the four key end-to-end processes: procure-to-pay (P2P), order-to-cash (O2C), record-to-report (R2R) and hire-to-retire (H2R).

As an early area of focus, Forvia wanted to simplify and automate its complex, 20-step manual journal entries. The various manual journal entry actions included validation rules with SAP, workflows, final posting, archiving and audit trails.

Solution

Faurecia selected Finance Automation by Redwood to transform GBS across its high-volume businesses worldwide.

Redwood had the expertise and experience required to support and manage a rapid rollout, as well as standardize and automate structured back-office processes involving SAP ERP and other key enterprise applications globally.

Redwood immediately targeted the complex, 20-step manual journal entry process because it had such an impact on the time required to complete the financial close.

Results

In less than six months, Redwood’s Professional Services team configured, implemented and integrated the Finance Automation deployment to meet Faurecia’s specific requirements. Faurecia then onboarded 1,300 end-users from its GBS and controlling teams.

With Redwood, Forvia standardized, simplified and automated 32,000, or 80%, of its global monthly journal entries that employees used to handle manually.

As intended, Forvia leveraged the automation to eliminate silos between functions, regions and countries. Thanks to the solution, Forvia continues to eliminate countless non-value-added tasks and ensured employees get involved only when review and approval are required.

Forvia automated its intercompany reconciliation and balance sheet review process and is continuing to automate its R2R, P2P and O2C processes.

Finance Automation reconciles balances and transactions, with accruals for exceptions raised and posted automatically. For key ICO service charges, Faurecia eliminated reconciliation by incorporating intercompany agreement, which then automatically generates and posts the opposite charges directly into the counterparty’s books.

While accelerating the financial close and reducing controllers’ workloads, Redwood has also provided a comprehensive, straightforward audit trail.