Business Impact

The consequences of these inefficiencies are significant. Delays in approval processes lead to late payments, straining supplier relationships, and risking financial penalties. Manual errors proliferate across the numerous applications finance teams use daily—on average, over 170 business applications in large enterprises. The constant toggling between systems and the time spent on repetitive tasks—up to 50% of a finance team’s workload—hinders productivity and leaves little room for strategic initiatives. Moreover, without clear visibility into end-to-end processes, managing working capital efficiently, enforcing compliance, or even identifying the most significant bottlenecks becomes nearly impossible. The result is a finance department that struggles to maintain its crucial role in driving business growth and stability.

Core Financial Processes

Every business's finance department is at its heart, driving financial success and stability. Finance teams are responsible for various tasks, from bookkeeping and invoicing to expense approvals, budgeting, and forecasting. They are crucial in managing the company’s financial resources, ensuring that every dollar is spent wisely and accurate data informs every financial decision.

The core financial processes typically managed by a finance department include:

🔷 Purchasing

Managing the procurement of goods and services, ensuring that purchases align with business needs and budgets.

🔷 Accounts Payable (AP)

Processing payments to suppliers, managing cash flow, and maintaining solid relationships with vendors.

🔷 Invoicing and Accounts Receivable (AR)

This involves issuing invoices and collecting payments, ensuring the business receives the due revenue.

🔷 Tax Compliance and Reporting

Ensuring the company complies with tax regulations and accurately reports financial information to authorities.

🔷 Travel and Expense Management

Overseeing employee expenses and travel costs, ensuring they are within budget and policy.

🔷 Financial Reporting

Providing accurate and timely financial statements that inform business decisions and satisfy regulatory requirements.

While each finance department may prioritize these processes differently, they all share the challenge of managing these critical tasks efficiently and significantly as business complexity increases. While most companies manage financial transactions well, the real challenge lies in handling the complexity of finance processes across numerous IT systems. With over 170 applications, finance teams spend significant time consolidating data and toggling between systems, leading to inefficiencies. Ennuviz research shows that finance employees spend 90 minutes weekly switching between applications and 50% of their time on repetitive tasks, making process management cumbersome and time-consuming.

The nature of finance departments is often hectic and fast-paced. However, a few common symptoms separate healthy financial processes from chronic finance process failure:

🔷 Delayed or slow approval

If payments are regularly delayed or approval processes are inefficient.

🔷Lack of clarity of roles

When it’s unclear who is responsible for critical metrics or tasks in processes and workflows.

🔷 Difficulty managing workload

When the finance team works overtime to meet monthly closing processes or other regular tasks.

🔷 Lack of visibility

When leadership cannot measure and impact the end-to-end processes that occur across different business functions and IT systems.

🔷 Continuous improvement

when there is a lack of process intelligence to drive continuous improvement by identifying bottlenecks, fostering accountability, and enabling ongoing optimization and adaptation to evolving business conditions.

What is Process Mining?

Process mining leverages event logs to provide insights into how processes are executed. For the Finance Department, this means optimizing operations by identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, ultimately enhancing overall performance.

What is SAP Signavio Business Process Transformation Suite?

SAP Signavio Business Process Transformation offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to optimize business processes efficiently and precisely. Central to this suite are robust solutions like SAP Signavio Process Insights and SAP Process Intelligence, which play a crucial role in uncovering actionable insights from complex data. SAP Signavio Process Insights enables businesses to swiftly identify inefficiencies and find potential improvements, delivering clear insights within 24 hours of implementation. This rapid feedback is vital for organizations aiming to streamline operations, enhance performance, and maximize ROI by addressing critical process weaknesses​​.

Further enhancing this transformation capability, SAP Process AI leverages artificial intelligence to provide advanced process automation and predictive analytics. Embedded seamlessly within the SAP Signavio solutions, SAP Process AI is designed to provide instant answers to process questions, uncover hidden issues, and deliver actionable improvement recommendations, all while being future-proofed with continuous learning. Critical capabilities of SAP Process AI include:

🔷Process Recommender

Empower your organization with instant best practice recommendations. Access a database of 5,000 best practices from SAP to quickly move from initial process exploration to design, accelerating process model development without consulting heavy services.

🔷Process Analyzer (Text to Insights)

Democratize process mining with natural language processing. Users of any skill level can ask questions and receive immediate, relevant insights from data, making informed decisions faster.

🔷Performance Indicator Recommender

This tool simplifies process monitoring with quick recommendations on relevant process performance indicators (PPIs). It links business problems, affected processes, and metrics, enabling a self-service approach to define an initial process monitoring framework.

As industries are reshaped by breakthroughs in Generative AI, SAP Signavio is at the forefront, leveraging Large Process Models (LPMs) to enhance its process transformation suite. LPMs extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by applying SAP’s extensive process and industry insights to Business Process Management (BPM). This innovative approach shortens time-to-insights, accelerates time-to-adapt, and improves process monitoring, reinforcing SAP Signavio's commitment to delivering unparalleled value to its customers.

Benefits Process Intelligence Can Deliver

Process Intelligence offers transformative benefits to finance departments, especially optimizing critical processes like Purchase-to-Pay (P2P). Here’s how Process Intelligence adds value to your organization

Maximizing Productivity

➡️ Helps finance teams significantly reduce cycle times and focus on higher-value activities by identifying repetitive, automatable tasks, such as three- or four-way matches.

➡️ Automating repetitive tasks reduces cycle times and allows finance teams to focus on higher-value activities, enhancing overall productivity.

Improving Supplier Performance

➡️ Accurate Master Data Management (MDM) ensures that supplier information—such as lead times, pricing, and quantities—is current, leading to timely payments and stronger supplier relationships.

Reducing Maverick-Buying Compliance

➡️Process Intelligence can pinpoint where unauthorized spending occurs, allowing finance leaders to take corrective action and reduce non-compliance risks.

Enhanced Compliance

➡️ By gaining complete visibility into unauthorized spending (maverick buying), finance leaders can enforce compliance more effectively, reducing risks and controlling costs.

Improving Working Capital:

➡️Process intelligence helps optimize cash flow by prioritizing invoices based on impact rather than processing them on a first-come, first-served basis. This reduces early and late payments. 

➡️By strategizing payment prioritization, finance teams can improve cash flow management and reduce the financial strain of early or late payments.

Reduced Operating Costs

➡️Ensuring that purchase orders (POs) and invoices are accurate from the start minimizes costly rework and reduces operational expenses.

Cutting Operational Costs

➡️ Ensuring that POs and invoices are correct from the start reduces the need for costly rework and minimizes operational expenses.

➡️ Process intelligence delivers significant value in critical use cases, including maximizing cash discounts, reducing late payments (and associated interest or penalties), and identifying automation opportunities within the P2P cycle.

Five Key Achievable Goals 

➡️ Maximizing Cash Discounts.

➡️ Reduce Late Payments to Avoid Interest and Penalties.

➡️Improve Audit Coverage and Reduce Non-Compliance.

➡️IdentifyAutomatable Opportunities.

➡️Continues Process Improvement

Key Accounts Payable Fraud Risks in 2024

In 2024, the evolving digital landscape presents new challenges for Accounts Payable (AP) departments, particularly in fraud. As organizations increase their reliance on digital processes, they must also be vigilant against sophisticated fraud schemes that can lead to significant financial losses. Here are some of the key AP fraud risks to be aware of:

🔷 Fake Invoices

Fraudsters now use advanced AI tools to create highly convincing counterfeit invoices from fictitious suppliers. These fraudulent invoices can easily slip through if not detected by equally advanced AI-driven tools.

Case Study: Ennuviz’s Expertise: Ennuviz helped a leading pharmaceutical company detect and prevent over $2 million in fraudulent invoices using SAP Signavio’s AI-powered process mining capabilities. This proactive approach drastically reduced financial leakage and bolstered the company’s defenses against sophisticated fraud tactics.

🔷 Duplicate Payments

As digital processes increase, the risk of duplicate payments—where a single invoice is paid multiple times—also rises. Not being identified and corrected promptly can lead to significant financial loss.

Case Study: Ennuviz’s solution enabled a Biotech Client, including a significant partnership with Moderna, to identify $1.5 million of duplicate invoices. Advanced monitoring and detection strategies ensured the financial operations remained efficient and secure.

🔷 Unauthorized Vendor Changes

Hackers can gain access to vendor data and alter payment information, redirecting funds without detection. This type of fraud can be particularly damaging as it is often difficult to detect until significant losses have occurred.

Case Study: Ennuviz’s Expertise: Through a meticulous vendor data review and security enhancement project, Ennuviz helped a global manufacturing client secure their vendor management system, preventing unauthorized changes and ensuring financial integrity.

Solution that Ennuviz Offers

Ennuviz addresses these challenges head-on with a robust solution powered by the SAP Signavio Business Process Transformation Suite. This solution offers finance teams the granular visibility they need to understand and truly optimize their processes. By combining process modeling, process mining, task mining, automation, and AI, Ennuviz highlights where inefficiencies exist and provides actionable insights to remediate them.

For example, in the P2P cycle, Ennuviz’s solution automates labor-intensive tasks such as the three-way match, significantly reducing errors and cycle times. This finance automation ensures that Master Data Management (MDM) is accurate and up to date, improving supplier performance and fostering stronger relationships. Additionally, Ennuviz enhances fraud detection capabilities, leveraging AI to identify anomalies in real-time and protect your business from potentially devastating financial losses.

🔷 Case Studies

Ennuviz’s solutions have driven substantial improvements across various industries:

🔷 Fraud Prevention

Ennuviz’s AI-powered fraud detection helped a leading pharmaceutical company prevent over $2 million in fraudulent invoices, significantly reducing financial leakage.

🔷 Cost Savings through Automation

A major retail chain achieved a 35% reduction in invoice processing time, allowing the finance team to shift focus to strategic financial planning.

🔷 Supplier Risk Management

Ennuviz implemented a supplier risk management system for a consumer goods company, reducing supply chain disruptions by 25%.

Read More:

Finance Audit and Compliance

Know More:

Procure to Pay: Excellence Unleashed

Summary

In 2024, the financial landscape is fraught with challenges, from fraud risks to inefficiencies in outdated financial processes. However, with the right finace automation tools and insights, these challenges can be transformed into opportunities for growth, innovation, and efficiency. Ennuviz, with its deep expertise and pre-built solutions, is poised to help your finance department navigate this complex landscape.

Are you ready to revolutionize your finance operations and uncover hidden value?

Contact Ennuviz to Schedule a Demo.

Let us show you how our solutions can empower your finance team with our efficient finance process automation to drive your organization’s success, ensuring compliance, security, operational excellence, and innovation well into the future.