Finning’s accounting and finance organization relied on tools that weren’t designed to effectively manage the month-end close, making the process highly challenging.

“It also made it difficult to standardize our processes and procedures across the organization, especially as we rely on several different ERPs.”
 
The team at Finning knew things could be better. As part of a record-to-report project, leadership performed a comprehensive review of the existing close and determined that both a shorter and lower-effort close were a priority for the company.
Stakeholders across Accounting, Finance, IT, and Audit needed a centralized, automated close solution to satisfy their requirements. In addition, business units that relied on SAP wondered why they needed another solution outside of the ERP.

The search led them to BlackLine, which complements and extends SAP and non-SAP ERPs.

“The capability of BlackLine to establish robust controls and automate processes really made it stand apart from the native functionality in the ERP systems.”

Delta, one of the world's largest global airlines, was preparing for a future ERP upgrade. They faced a demanding close process characterized by manual, spreadsheet-heavy work that consumed valuable resources. Recognizing the need for change, Delta's Controllership Innovation team sought to create process efficiencies and strengthen controls to de-risk and accelerate its long-term finance transformation journey. They needed a "gold standard for record-to-report."

The strategy was to build the transformation in deliberate layers. The team chose SAP Accounting Automation Solutions by BlackLine for their deep integration with Delta's existing SAP environment. By first standardizing processes and cleaning up data in BlackLine, Delta was able to simplify its future ERP upgrade, calling it a "no-regrets move."

Anglo American operates across six continents and employs more than 53,000 people. The sheer scale of the business made it difficult for finance and accounting to ensure compliance and drive standardization across all processes.
 
“Many of our accounting processes were still siloed, which led to inconsistencies and created a lot of non-value-added work.”

Prado and his team knew they needed to update their record-to-report process, from improving the quality of their reconciliations to standardizing journals. As part of a company-wide financial transformation, Anglo American decided to create a new shared services center. Prado, for whom shared service centers are a passion, knew the secret was putting together the right process, people, and technology.

Anglo American saw the opportunity to implement a single R2R solution that could be used across the globe.

“That’s why, at the start of our finance transformation journey, we partnered with BlackLine. Not only are they the leader in the space, but they also integrate seamlessly with SAP.”