Siemens automates and optimizes AR in a complex global shared services model
- Industry: Electronics and electrical engineering
- Revenue: 72 Billion
- Employees: 400,000
- Headquarters: Munich, Germany
Business need
Business need
Siemens is a global leader in electronics and electrical engineering with close to 400,000 employees working globally on manufacturing, design, and services.
Siemens’s AR complexity challenge
After a long period of consistent and successful growth, Siemens’s IT landscape complexity had spiralled to the point that its various subsidiaries and affiliates relied on dozens of different systems to manage accounts receivable processes across multiple shared services centres. Resulting in inefficient processes in AR, cash application, and bank statement reconciliation with limited global visibility.
In particular, matching remittance advices to invoices and incoming payments posed a huge challenge. The company had already partially addressed this by the time they realized the need for transformation – but managing matching through email for hundreds of thousands of transactions a year wasn’t sustainable and required a more long term, fully automated approach.
Solution implemented
Solution implemented
Siemens’s transformation approach
To ensure long-term harmonization of all AR processes Siemens chose to partner with Serrala to leverage fully SAP-embedded automation capabilities. Automating receivables and bank statement processing is never a “finished project” thanks to shifting business and regulatory requirements. Siemens also saw the value of Serrala here as our solutions are fully “ownable” by finance teams, requiring no IT support to adjust or overhaul business rules, redesign workflows, and implement continuous improvements.
The company piloted our FS² AutoBank solution in Italy and France before rolling out to all of Southwest Europe and Russia with support of Serrala consultants. With the strategic learnings and knowledge transfer provided by our consultants, Siemens has since been able to roll out implementation in 17 more markets independently, with further expansions in the works.
Results achieved
Results achieved
The results – robust, finance-controlled automated cash application
Siemens have already seen significant improvements in cash application processes, including high degrees of straight-through automation, huge reductions to unapplied cash, and high degrees of automated matching.
The company is currently looking to follow up its successes by extending the solution into other areas – including further automation of remittance advices processing, automating lockbox processing (which they’ve already successfully piloted in the US), and enhancing internal and external stakeholder communication and collaboration with redesigned workflows.
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