APA accelerates speed to value of finance processes

DXC Technology was challenged with transforming its financial systems and processes. DXC had recently launched as a new company, created by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services (ES) business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The accounts payable (AP) systems and processes needed to be fully integrated. The ES process was semi-automated, and the CSC process was manual. DXC engaged APA from BPS to drive process harmonization and improvements.

Ravi Bhatia, vice president of Finance and Supply Chain Shared Services at DXC, says, “The APA engagement has been one of the big success stories in Finance Shared Services for DXC. The team was able to study the AP processes across two organizations, come up with improvements and implement the solution in 12 weeks. This has resulted in cost savings and has provided us with a blueprint for future automations.”

Driving business efficiency

With approval from DXC’s chief financial officer, BPS piloted its innovative APA solution. This solution is a data discovery-led approach to improving business processes with robotics using industry knowledge from BPS experts, harnessing dark data and incorporating cognitive computing in the cloud. Simply put, APA is a service to optimize and improve processes faster.

Agile Process Automation is a platform that consists of robotic process automation in the cloud, with a set of services delivered via a consumption-based model that helps customers quickly create, manage, measure and improve processes to push through the obstacles of enterprise inefficiencies.

The initial work involved the AP process of DXC’s Finance department and was conducted in two phases. First, standard processes were created across both legacy companies through engaged leadership from the two organizations. Workflow decisions were then aligned and agreed upon to ensure transparency and traceability of invoices from receipt to post/payment and to avoid issues with manual tracking.

Second, the team took several actions to implement agile AP systems and processes:

Engaged SAP to create visibility for invoices with external and internal stakeholders

Reduced supplier queries to the help desk

Eradicated manual data input to the ERP system by automating a standardized global template

Eliminated first-level data capture, assuring 100 percent accuracy

Removed manual payment runs

Migrated AP spreadsheet data to APA, facilitating future observation and analysis

Real value to the business

The project was a major success and led to DXC’s Finance department recommending using BPS APA for future finance projects. “APA took a one-team approach, working together with the internal AP team and jointly developing the robotics solution for DXC’s accounts payable processes,” says John Antony, DXC’s global financial software and solutions lead in robotics and automation. “The solution will help mitigate our current challenges without involving a big system change. The team, in addition, has provided us with a template to solve future problems in other finance areas. A big thanks goes to the APA team.”

Gurumurthy Raman, director of Global AP Operations at DXC, says, “It has been a great experience working with the APA team. They have excellent tools in their portfolio, including a tool to create a value stream map with empirical data directly from systems with no manual intervention. The team is also pragmatic and has developed a holistic solution across the spectrum of accounts payable operations. I highly recommend APA and the team for their detailed approach to problem-solving and their focus on results.”

Project takeaways

It is important to note that APA is not right for every company. A company’s processes should be working well, and its data should be organized, before attempting any form of process automation and optimization.

Other factors to consider when evaluating a finance transformation project include:

Risks associated with one-off consulting-led projects, which are not sustainable and often fail

Potentially misleading messages from software vendors and consultants

Long learning curves

Costs of starting from scratch versus leveraging a library of pre-built automation assets

Impact of sustaining expensive consulting support services

Acute shortage of experienced resources in the market

“The DXC accounts payable process has a mix of legacy and diverse systems, which in itself is a challenge. However, with BPS APA, we were able to get a true sense of the non-value-added in the process and appropriately streamline to achieve quicker turnaround time,” says DXC AP lead Saroj Padhi. “APA has the much-needed capability of understanding the system and process landscape while developing solutions, without disturbing the core applications and process environment.”