Powering financial insights with centralized data

The company's complex ERP landscape – a result of multiple acquisitions – made managing data difficult and time-consuming for its finance team. Manual processes and struggles to collate data from various sources made tax reporting almost impossible. As a result, the company faced steep noncompliance fees and governance risks.

The company relied heavily on legacy on-premises systems to ingest, process, and store data. Not only were these systems more expensive than cloud-based solutions, but they also failed to provide sufficient data encryption, leaving data vulnerable to attack. Worse still, these systems needed a large amount of support staff for incident management and enhancements.

It became clear that inefficient tax reporting was just one symptom of a larger problem. Data management inefficiencies across finance were taking their toll, and the company needed a comprehensive digital transformation plan.

The company turned to Genpact for help, and we began by assessing its operations and technology stack to find areas for improvement. We partnered with subject matter experts from across the business to uncover their preferences and use cases, laying the groundwork for a strategic transformation roadmap.

This research led us to build a finance data hub. This scalable, user-friendly, and cost-effective hub uses cloud data technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Synapse, Power BI, Informatica, and Azure Dev Apps. With a consumption and reporting layer for tax reporting, the hub delivers self-service reports in near real time.

To address data security issues, we created an end-to-end solution to manage data easier. This solution automates data access, connects with Active Directory for access, automatically hides sensitive data to prevent leaks, and offers data retention, archiving, and tracking features.

The transformation roadmap includes AI-driven workflows and predictive analytic capabilities to future-proof the hub. This ensures the hub can grow and evolve to meet emerging business needs while keeping costs controlled.

The finance data hub has already greatly improved tax reporting, reducing tax false positives by 60%. It has also optimized working capital to improve cash flow by 5% and helped the company avoid penalties by adhering to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), a regulatory requirement in the US.

As a single source of truth for financial data, the hub provides over 200 real-time business intelligence reports, enabling 20% of the finance team to focus on other work. Better still, this move to the cloud has delivered IT infrastructure savings of over $10 million.

The hub is a future-proof solution that can seamlessly integrate and harmonize more than 20 sources and thousands of data elements from across the business. And the potential for AI and machine learning will help the company meet a range of key performance indicators (KPIs) for business process improvements.

As a next step, the company will explore how financial planning and analysis, budget and forecasting, and treasury functions can be supported by the hub. And Genpact will be there every step of the way.