BlackLine walks the path with a global beverage company

When CFOs are pursuing investment in software to support their F&A function, much will depend on the company’s starting point – its current strategies, needs, data complexities, and its existing technologies and talent. Identifying the right technology to deliver the much-needed outcome for its finance function can be a big challenge, companies should not use their legacy enterprise resource planning and other backbone systems as excuses to not start to digitize their F&A function. This report discusses the business case of the CFO office of a leading global beverage company and how the company is working towards centralizing its finance process using BlackLine, a SaaS continuous accounting platform that provides integrated applications for financial close processes and numerous automated solutions for F&A functions.

Finance leaders need digital enabling tools and analytics to reconcile and fulfill their growing portfolio of evolving responsibilities

The CFO’s role in this international brewer is changing, keeping pace with enterprises across industries. Amid a raft of new duties, the beverage company’s CFO office is mandated with transformation, capability building, and digitalization goals. The CFO’s job as a strategic partner, sitting at the center of the operating committee or the leadership team, requires analytics-powered insights to provide a sense of changing customer and consumer behavior, global brewer networks, climate-carbon neutrality, the impact of the company’s environmental initiatives, the competitive landscape, and pricing. CFOs need these to do their job effectively.
What is holding them back? They do not have readily available, relevant, high-quality data to run analytics on to draw these insights. It would be challenging to embark on a data transformation across the board with such a large scope, and slow progress is possible. Therefore, the brewer has prioritized centralizing its critical financial operations.

Technology landscape is different, and each speaks a different language; the data that comes out is not the same. In such cases, it is difficult to implement analytics; however, as we are trying to centralize our processes, we are closer to adopting more data analytics tools.

—Senior Global Process Expert, global beverage company

Centralizing financial operations for the brewer is a lot more complex and requires ingenuity and an advanced digital platform to unload the burden

Like many large organizations, the global beverage company struggles with legacy inflexible and monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and must cobble together disparate systems to form a centralized process. It needed a record-to-report (R2R) platform solution that could work with these complex ERP systems to centralize its financial operations. BlackLine’s was a preferred choice for its cloud-agnostic experience, seamless integration into the brewer’s complex ERP architecture, and the ability to map itself to multiple channels to draw data and centralize financial operations.

Centralized financial operations can drive tremendous benefits to the internal brewer in the long term

We believe the global beverage company can gain more by rationalizing and consolidating its multiple systems. This may be more expensive and disruptive in the short term, but it will likely deliver greater benefits over time. It’s a complex endeavor requiring companies to build new capabilities. The brewer introduced BlackLine “to build new capabilities for the beverage company’s financial operations.”

BlackLine built a central financial data ecosystem for the brewer, enabling digital and analytical use cases for the organization. In the past, the beverage company’s limited adoption of automation in financial and accounting processes had added to its data complexities. With the configuration of BlackLine, the brewer could transition from processing high volumes of disparate transactions manually to a central data model allowing speedy digitally enabled processing. Financial records from different regions and industries are fed into the BlackLine platform and the result is reconciliation and a consolidated balance sheet.

Using BlackLine, the international beverage company gets insights on the quality of balance. We now see opportunities in the balance sheet that can help us move the needle and know things we didn’t in past.

—Senior Global Process Expert, global beverage company

The global beverage company aspires for continuous accounting where its talent can focus on risk rather than volume

Digitalizing the finance function may be enticing conceptually, but benefits might be elusive, especially if the finance executives are not grounded in a clear understanding of digital’s role and can’t clearly articulate the target end state. The brewer’s digital aspiration is well defined; the company is partnering with BlackLine to establish a lean model for its financial operation, helping migrate to SAP S4/HANA, establishing a smart close journey, closing calendar in the cloud, matching automated transactions, and analyzing accounts. The global beverage company’s goal is to ensure its highly qualified finance talent focuses on analyzing risk and driving strategies rather than processing transactions.

The Bottom Line: Identify and implement value and purpose-led solutions like BlackLine to take you to the desired target state of digital finance

Each organization’s digital journey is different; what is important is how you put digital technologies to work, especially the value they drive and how intensively employees use the tools in their daily activities. This is a business case of the CFO office kick-starting the digital process with the implementation of BlackLine to centralize its finance function, by successfully digitalizing the most critical tasks within finance, the CFO has established proof points and eased the eventual rollout of technologies across other parts of the company. BlackLine is the foremost part of the solution for the global beverage company in bridging the gap between its legacy processes and modernizing financial operations.