In recent years, a well-known state-owned optical fiber cable manufacturer has been rapidly increasing its market share and sales share through industrial upgrading. In this process, the manufacturer’s Finance Department faced many major challenges, one of which was around building an effective and competitive financial service team in order to provide the best financial services, improve financial efficiency, reduce service costs, and achieve innovations in the financial system.

Through building a strategic partnership with Fortune Technology Company, the well-known state-owned optical cable manufacturer adopted Fortune Technology’s RPA finance robot consulting and implementation services based on IBM Cloud Pak for Automation to help optimize its financial processes, reduce costs and increase efficiency. Meanwhile, it also promoted the transformation of its financial organization and laid a solid foundation for building digital and intelligent finance in the future.

In recent years, a well-known state-owned optical fiber cable manufacturer has been rapidly increasing its market share and sales share through industrial upgrading. This rapid development of the enterprise came with a steady increase in the business volume of its financial department that now needed to be tackled efficiently.

Business personnel from the settlement center, the sales center, and the manufacturing center of the financial department were responsible for the management of the enterprise's receivables and payables for its customers and suppliers (bank statement downloading, receipt breakdown, receipt breakdown and accounting, and payment accounting), invoicing application, invoice information maintenance, bank bill issuance, bill accounting and entry, and other financial operations.

Its financial personnel used to log into and operate multiple back-end and front-end systems every day, including the corporate Internet banking systems, the OA system, the corporate cloud storage system, the finance system, the fund management system, the tax management software, the process approval system, etc. Financial personnel had to complete tedious and complex financial processes and operations, so they were quite bothered by a large workload and low efficiency, and often had to work overtime on weekdays and at the end of each month. For example, in order to download corporate Internet banking statements, personnel of the settlement center of the Finance Department had to log into and operate the corporate Internet banking systems of more than 10 banks, involving more than 100 bank accounts every day. Downloading bank statements was tedious and error-prone, and it was particularly difficult to manage the USB devices for various corporate Internet banking systems.

Therefore, the enterprise urgently needed an intelligent solution to help build an effective and competitive financial service team, so as to provide the best financial service experiences, improve work efficiency and reduce human errors and service costs.

After the adoption of the automatic operation processes of the RPA finance robots, tedious and repetitive tasks can now be completed on a 24x7 basis, greatly saving the time consumed by financial personnel in various processes. For example, after analyzing the working hours of existing invoicing operations and fund management operations of the settlement center, the RPA finance robots were introduced to save 75% and 73% of the labor hours invested in the two business scenarios respectively. Moreover, the time consumed in processing unstructured business data and manual review is now eliminated, effectively saving unnecessary costs and improving employee productivity.

The timeliness and effectiveness of business responses were improved

After most of the repetitive tasks were handled by the RPA finance robots, their accuracy, efficiency, and compliance were improved to a great extent. For example, in the bank statement downloading and accounting processes of the settlement center of the Finance Department, robots automatically downloaded, sorted and delivered a large amount of data, which not only greatly improved efficiency but also ensured that the accuracy rate reached 100%. The time consumed for preparing monthly reports was reduced from 10 days to 6 days.

The shortage of staff in the Finance Department was solved

In the enterprise, many complex financial processes needed to be completed by the personnel of the Finance Department, so a lot of manpower and material resources were required to handle repetitive and tedious tasks. After the introduction of the RPA finance robots, personnel of the Finance Department can complete work tasks smoothly on weekdays and at the end of every month, and no longer need to work overtime.

The launch of the 9 finance robots solved the core pain points of the Finance Department in an effective way, transformed the original working methods and concepts of financial personnel, and promoted the reform of the financial organization, requiring the personnel to improve their competency and skills. Subsequently, the finance robots will identify and implement more application scenarios for the Finance Department, recognize representative and valuable business scenarios (empowering AI), discover representative processes for front-end and back-end business departments and launch pilot programs, improve robot utilization and assessment standards, continuously develop their capabilities in delivery and operation and maintenance, based on which a robot-based Center of Excellence (CoE) will be built.

Robotic process automation (RPA) has become a general trend of development. In the future, based on IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, Fortune Technology Company will help more enterprises optimize their financial processes, improve business processing efficiency and quality, reduce risks in financial compliance, allocate resources to more value-added businesses, promote financial transformation, and drive the digital reinvention of enterprises in the future.

Founded in 2013, Fortune Technology Company (link resides outside of ibm.com) (also referred to as "Fortune Technology") is committed to providing organizations and enterprises with flexible digital human resources. As a culmination of long-term practices and years of development, Fortune Technology has accumulated rich experiences in the automation of data systems and information systems, and has a business scope covering end-to-end RPA product sale, project consulting, process development and software implementation, process operation and maintenance, and technical training. Fortune Technology has subsidiaries based in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Dalian, providing clients with localized service supports and responses in a timely manner.