Streamlining financial operations for workspace solutions company
The Client
The client is the world’s largest provider of flexible workplaces, with products and services ranging from fully equipped offices to professional meeting rooms, business lounges and the world’s largest network of video communication studios.
The Challenge
The client had their IT and financial teams working from at two global locations. Since volume of work grew proportionately to business growth, work related to financial transactions including voucher submissions, claims settlement and cash transfers were putting tremendous pressure on internal resources. The client wanted to outsource these processes to a reliable and efficient technology partner.
They had two key IT systems for managing financial operations. A key objective of the project was to ensure close collaboration with the IT divisions operating from two global locations.
Our Solution
Starting with small projects, blackrock moved on to provide a larger team to support the client’s software development, maintenance and support activities.
1) Banking Interface Engine
The banking interface engine automates the client’s supplier payments processing. It generates supplier payment files (tamper protected) for each bank in the standard formats specified. It can also handle multiple file formats based on the bank, country and payment method chosen by the supplier. The engine can also support submission of payment files through a SWIFT network.
2) Bank Statement Upload
To automate the accounting process for customer receipts through banks, a bank statement upload process was created and initiated through manual/automated upload. Once the file is uploaded, the application executes a rule engine that identifies the customer and the invoice against which payment was made. The upload engine generates and posts journal entries to the accounting application. Invoice allocation is also completed in the application.
3) BI & Data warehousing
The client’s financial transaction data from different business units in different countries is spread out in separate databases and servers. To gain insights into business unit/country wise performance, there was a critical need for data consolidation. blackrock worked together with the client to extract all financial transaction data into a central data warehouse. Historical data was consolidated using a one-time migration process. A set of BI reports were developed from the consolidated data to track and monitor business unit performance.
4) FinApp
A middleware solution was built to integrate all the data flows between the ERP and the data providers such as acquirers, payment service providers, and banks worldwide. FinApp is used extensively with front end master screens, data collection, data processing and data distribution processes.
5) Credit Card/Acquirer Payment Uploads
A solution was created to support different payment service providers/acquirer data uploads such as Datacash, ELAVON, Global Collect, EMS etc. The solution performs automatic ledger posting of acquirer payment transactions and handles cross boarder (multi-currency) payments.
6) Data Migration
The client’s Latin American division had been using an older version of their financial software, and hence data migration is supported for them. Documentation User and technical documentation were created for the client’s financial systems, as a separate project.
End-User Support End-user support is continuously provided for the client that has close to 500 users spread across different geographical locations. Requests for support are raised as tickets using a help-desk software and assigned to blackrock resources for resolution and closure.
Business Impact
- End-to-end financial system support helps client focus on core IT
- Replacement of manual processes improved productivity of accounting division by 60%
- Quick and accurate payment processing resulted in improved customer satisfaction
- Payment discrepancies brought down by 90%
- Invoice to payment cycle time brought down to less than a week
- Response times for support requests improved.
- Software changes documented and prioritized in discussion with client IT team
- Stringent quality check gates resulted in high software quality levels
- Streamlined processes led to planned and prioritized release cycles
- Streamlining improved IT process transparency.