Leveraging Cloud to Automate and Consolidate F&A for a Food Manufacturer

This case study examines how WNS helped a leading food manufacturer digitally automate finance. 

As we know…

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands operate in a rapidly changing and highly complex environment. Exacerbating the complexity for global businesses are the expansion of product portfolios, entry into new markets and integration of new entities. Typical consequences of these organic and inorganic growth activities are disjointed systems and business processes that strain functions such as Finance and Accounting (F&A).

Not only do disparate processes hurt organizations in their pursuit of greater control and unified visibility, but they also impede the ability to adapt to evolving situations and opportunities. Cloud-based workflow solutions enable companies to drive intelligent automation in finance, bringing in greater control and agility.

The challenge for the client was…

Its use of multiple tools and technologies as part of the F&A operations landscape hindered unified visibility and control, impacting growth and scalability. A considerable global presence resulted in different business units adopting distinct F&A processes, workflows and approval hierarchies. Moreover, repetitive tasks such as invoice processing, service management, quality checks, exceptions management and approvals required significant manual efforts.

The client wanted to integrate and streamline its end-to-end F&A function across 70 odd entities, implementing scalable and configurable processes to meet its evolving needs. While optimizing governance and control, the client was looking to build a robust foundation to enable finance automation and transformation at speed.

WNS stepped in as a co-creation partner…

Combining its deep domain and functional expertise with capabilities in digital to transform the client’s F&A landscape. We leveraged WNS TRAC™, our proprietary suite of next-gen technology solutions, to streamline and standardize F&A operations. We implemented WNS TRAC™ workflow suites across the key F&A functional towers of Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Record-to-Report (R2R) and inventory / costing to automate and manage end-to-end processes.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-hosted workflow solution enabled WNS and the food manufacturer to co-create configurable, scalable and cost-efficient F&A processes underpinned by a modular and low-code architecture. Notably, the plug-and-play solution was customizable to integrate new entities and additional layers of approvals and conditions.

The solution entailed:

• Automated ingestion of invoices / requests / queries across multiple channels, including scanned copies, e-mails, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and web form
• Unique identifiers for each request and determination of the approval matrix and Service Level Agreement (SLA) based on the nature of the request – invoice, query resolution, etc.
• Graphical dashboards and real-time reports for business activity monitoring

Notably, WNS implemented the solution during the pandemic, executing the transition remotely – encompassing the milestones of due diligence, process discovery, knowledge transfer and user training – while adhering to stringent timelines.

WNS’ cost-effective, cloud-based solution…

Met the client’s fundamental need for standardized, configurable and scalable F&A processes. It streamlined vital and repetitive operations within the functional towers of P2P, R2R and inventory / costing, enabling human resources to focus on strategic activities. The solution simplified and virtualized approval management, bringing into play a mobile-enabled approval process. Other key benefits include: