A Companion Guide to Finance Transformation:

Accelerate transformation initiatives and deliver quarter-on-quarter value at the same time

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01 Understand the disconnect

Finance transformation. It’s a term applied to a wide range of business initiatives, but it isn’t a catch-all endeavor, and the drivers of finance transformation initiatives vary greatly.

In some cases your initiatives will be driven by specific events, including system migrations, or a change in operating model such as outsourcing to shared services. In others, they will be inspired by a general realization that your organization needs to become leaner, more resilient, and more intelligent to remain competitive and financially robust in a changing landscape.

And finance transformation initiatives often have different priorities or focus areas. Perhaps improving cash flow, reducing costs, or accelerating productivity?

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Long-term improvement for today’s priorities

But one thing nearly all finance transformation initiatives have in common is that they are slow and cumbersome. Inherently complex, and with almost endless boxes to tick, strategic finance transformation can take several years. Even then they don’t always achieve their goals.

These long timeframes present a challenge when your business wants to achieve financial outcomes right away. Operational improvements are needed to remain competitive and manage challenging economic realities today. Not five years down the road.

There’s a disconnect between the usual timeframe of transformation initiatives and the urgency of meeting financial outcomes.

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Typical time to ROI

for transformation initiatives

1-2 years

Improved cash management

2-5 years

Operating model optimization

3-5 years

System modernization & migration

So, what if there was a way to speed up your finance transformation initiatives and make them smarter, while also increasing visibility, finding immediate operational improvements, and hitting quarter-on-quarter goals along the way? There is — it’s called process mining.

02 Discover process mining

Process mining is a technology that’s used to model, analyze, and optimize business processes. Think of it as an MRI that shows how your processes actually run — not how you think they run — and identifies value opportunities within those processes.

Faster and far more accurate than subjective process mapping, process mining offers objective, fact-based insights to enable data-driven decisions. It layers on top of your existing systems, helping you to leverage existing technology investments without disrupting your business.
Within the finance organization, opportunities to drive immediate value and accelerate transformation initiatives include optimizing working capital to improve cash flow, cutting costs in processes such as Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) or Order-to-Cash, or accelerating productivity across the Accounts Receivable (AR) or Accounts Payable (AP) teams.

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Finance Transformation explained

Process mining allows you to determine the most impactful opportunities that will drive the greatest value, with the least effort.

Prioritizing these ‘low-hanging fruit’ value opportunities, means you can expand from there and connect the dots between different processes. You can capture the value you need right now, and not wait years for your transformation initiatives to conclude.

The opportunities you’ll pursue tend to prioritize one of three distinct goals, which are improving cash flow, reducing costs, and accelerating productivity.

03 Improve cash flow

There are value opportunities to be found across processes in AP and AR that will improve working capital, and ultimately free cash flow.

In AP, this may mean purchasing with the most favorable terms to ensure optimal payment time, for instance by addressing short payment terms. It may also mean eliminating payment term mismatches that unnecessarily drive down Days Payable Outstanding (DPO).

In AR, opportunities include optimizing payment terms and reducing late billing, as well as streamlining and intelligently prioritizing collections based on data-driven insights.

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Chris Knapik

Senior Director of Process Transformation

Read more about PepsiCo's success

”The working capital impact that Celonis has had — in the range of millions — is quite astonishing”

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04 Reduce costs

Cutting costs is a common goal of strategic finance transformation initiatives, whether that’s by reducing the cost of goods sold (COGS) or minimizing selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A).

Improving contract usage is one example that encompasses multiple use cases, such as eliminating contract leakage or analyzing spend to create new contracts. Cash discount realization can also be improved by prioritizing invoices to drive on-time payments, and leveraging real-time reporting on open blocked invoices.
In addition, duplicate payments can be eliminated by using real-time analysis to flag similarities in invoices or outgoing payments. And bad debt expense can be minimized by using real-time, data-driven risk assessment to inform credit limits.

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3 steps to cost reduction

Check out our video to discover the three steps you can take to start reducing costs right now.

Christian Unterbusch

VP of Operational and Strategic Steering for Procure-to-Pay at DTSE

Read more about Deutsche Telekom's success

”Employees who were doing low-value transactional tasks in the past, now have the time to select suppliers or negotiate better payment terms. This helps our teams achieve millions in savings throughout the year.”

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05 Accelerate productivity

There are multiple ways you can boost productivity and drive immediate value to accelerate finance transformation initiatives.

Simplifying procurement is one use case, which could include reducing discrepancies between purchase requisition (PR) and purchase order (PO) documents by matching against the organization’s master data.
You can also minimize AP throughput time by streamlining common actions such as goods receipt (GR) follow up that may otherwise delay invoice processing. And you can accelerate dispute discovery and shorten dispute cycle times in AR through data-driven identification of likely issues.

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Michael Markman

VP, Head of Financial Shared Services at IQVIA

Read more about IQVIA's success

”We’ve already generated, on a working capital basis, hundreds of thousands of dollars per day that’s resulted from increasing our days payable outstanding, while decreasing our day sales outstanding. And the overall cumulative result has been multiple millions of dollars of savings.”

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Optimizing DPO webinar

Are you ready to increase productivity in AP? Take a look at our 20-minute webinar Celonis for Finance: Optimizing DPO, to achieve quick cash flow wins in AP without deprioritizing your long-term transformation goals.

Watch

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06 Gain end-to-end visibility

Your finance transformation initiatives rarely just involve one team. And they rarely stay with the finance organization itself, but are often impacted by other departments across the business.

That means they involve a complex web of interconnected processes. Without full visibility into these processes, finance transformation initiatives are almost guaranteed to fail. To understand where the real value opportunities are — and implement the data-driven apps and automations that will allow you to act on them — you need end-to-end visibility.

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Understanding interconnected processes

Conventional process mining helps you understand how your processes truly run and discover value opportunities. But there’s now an even more powerful iteration of process mining that goes even deeper and gives you this end-to-end view. Object-centric process mining, also known as OCPM, is the newest innovation in process mining technology and it allows organizations to better visualize and analyze how processes are interconnected across business operations.

While classic process mining looks at single objects such as sales orders, purchase orders, or invoices, to determine how they flow through a particular process, OCPM reveals the interplay between these various objects within your processes as they move through their connected lifecycle.

OCPM brings new capabilities and opportunities to accelerate finance transformation initiatives, while making them more focused and intelligent.

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07 Make the case for process mining

When organizations are looking to improve high-level financial results — whether that’s by reducing costs, improving cash flow, or increasing productivity — the focus is rarely on individual business processes.

Business leaders are unlikely to think small changes to individual operational processes can achieve the type of impact they want to make on high-level KPIs. But these hidden value opportunities can have an enormous impact, and that case will inevitably have to be made when your organization is considering process mining.

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About Celonis

Celonis enables customers to optimize their business processes. Powered by its leading process mining technology, Celonis provides a unique set of capabilities for business executives and users to continuously find improvement opportunities within and across processes, and execute targeted actions to rapidly enhance process performance. This optimization yields immediate cash impact, radically improves customer experience, and reduces carbon emissions. Celonis has thousands of implementations with global customers including many of the world’s leading companies, and is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with more than 20 offices worldwide.

Are you ready to accelerate your long-term finance transformation initiatives, while also driving immediate value and hitting your quarter-on-quarter goals?

Let's talk

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