How Hubbell Modernized Their Global Accounting Processes

Hubbell is a $4.6 billion manufacturer of high quality, reliable electrical products and utility solutions for a broad range of customer and end-market applications. The company has aggressively grown through domestic and international acquisitions since its founding in the late 1880’s, resulting in a decentralized accounting function with decentralized processes.

In 2014, Hubbell’s accounting and finance team identified the need to modernize. Their finance transformation initiative, referred to as One Hubbell Finance, was officially underway and included a foundation with both BlackLine and SAP.

Sue Mozdzer, Hubbell’s finance transformation leader R2R, will be talking about Hubbell’s modern accounting journey at SAPInsider Financials on March 19 at 10:30 am. Here are a few highlights from their story.

One of the goals of Hubbell’s transformation was to standardize, simplify, and automate. They’ve achieved all three by leveraging BlackLine’s integrated solutions.

Like many customers, they began with a focus on balance sheet account reconciliations. Over time, Hubbell expanded its use of BlackLine capabilities to address journal entry, intercompany, and other close tasks, seeking additional opportunities for automation and efficiency.

With many successes under their belt, Hubbell’s accounting and finance organization knew there was still room to improve. In 2019, they began searching for more opportunities to transform, optimize, and automate. They brought in experts from BlackLine for a three-day workshop in October, and by the end, they’d identified 40 different use cases for additional improvement.

The workshop was so successful because of the ideas brought to the table by Hubbell end users. They couldn’t see all the possibilities for end-to-end automation until they brought experts and users together—and they now have a long list of ways to use BlackLine to automate their processes.

One of the outcomes of Hubbell’s workshops was the implementation of BlackLine’s matching functionality, which Hubbell calls “the BlackLine magic lamp”. After seeing a demonstration with real-life applications, they realized the opportunities for automation are endless with this functionality.

BlackLine functionality has been driving high productivity gains. Their system is now able to match 99% of their 3 million rows of data each month, saving a significant amount of time.

Hubbell was the first BlackLine customer to go live with BlackLine’s intercompany solution in 2015. They needed to replace their existing, home-grown system and worked with BlackLine developers to identify types of functionality that needed to be included in this solution from an SAP customer perspective. Now, new acquisitions require little effort and new users can easily be trained.

Join us at SAPInsider Financials 2020 to hear the rest of this story directly from Hubbell on March 19 at 10:30 am. You’ll learn more about the processes they identified for automation and their many post-workshop successes.