To continually provide high-quality protein products amid increasing costs, Maple Leaf Foods must invest in front-end improvements, such as innovative facilities and production methods. Yet the efficiency of the company’s back-end processes— especially finance and accounting—suffered in return. According to Vinh Lien, director of Finance and Accounting at Maple Leaf Foods, “When you’re growing a business, you’re looking at improving the front end to reduce costs. That means back-end processes like finance often get addressed last, if at all.” 

For Lien, the company’s reconciliation process was most in need of improvement. “I came from an organization that had been through finance transformation. So, coming to Maple Leaf was quite an eye-opener. While the company’s close was pretty good, the account reconciliation process was still 100% manual. I hadn’t seen that many binders floating around in eight years.”

Reconciliations were completed, printed, reviewed, signed, and then rescanned back into a server. Then reviewers would go into the server and check each reconciliation against the trial balance in SAP. “It was an insane amount of work. It took eight hours at the end of the month just to go on to a shared drive to see if the reconciliations were uploaded. The process wasn’t improving the quality of the recs. People were just checking to see they were done.” 

A lack of visibility with the current process also opened the company up to tremendous risk. “If you have binders and paper floating around, how do you have any visibility?” says Lien. “At the end of the quarter, we have to answer an accounting control questionnaire. One of the questions is ‘Are you comfortable that all the account reconciliations are completed?’ Well, they’re checked, but the bigger question is ‘Are all the reconciliations accurate and done at the level of quality we expect them to be?’ You’re hoping people will come and tell you if something is wrong.”

During the search for a new reconciliation solution, leadership questioned why Lien and her team didn’t just implement SAP’s close module. “SAP is a great tool, and it’s our backbone. But it’s bulky and on-premise. The reporting capability is limited. They’re not investing in this space, but they are making space for vendors who are.”

Instead, Lien and her team reviewed two leaders in finance transformation platforms, including BlackLine, an SAP preferred vendor. “I had used a BlackLine competitor at my previous company, and so I was biased toward that system. But we asked both companies to come in and do a presentation. After the BlackLine demo, there was a consensus. Everyone in the room loved BlackLine. They thought it was easy to understand and much more intuitive.” 

The team selected BlackLine over the competitor for additional reasons, including ease of integration and implementation, as well as BlackLine’s maturity. “We wanted to make sure we went with a solution that was a major player in the space. BlackLine offered scalability through other modules, so we knew we could grow with them,” says Lien. “We needed something that was completely seamless, a solution that would grab files directly from SAP. So, BlackLine’s SAP extractor was key.”