Client Success Story
Abengoa is a $7.1 billion global company with approximately 24,000 employees worldwide that specialize in two high-growth sectors, energy and environment. Their business is structured around three activities: engineering and construction, concession-type infrastructures and industrial production. Abengoa Bioenergy is the business division that produces supplies and develops new technology of biofuels and chemical bioproducts, as well as manages and trades related raw material and commodities.
Challenge
Management preferred not to wait one week into the next month to begin accessing results and analyzing the previous month’s performance. They also preferred to be more proactive in offering a solutions as the existing process was to manually search in SAP for multiple inputs, then extract and perform the needed calculations in Excel. This took too much time for controllers and managers and didn´t allow them to see the details or overall picture to take immediate action. Abengoa Bioenergy´s accounting department needed a 24/7 access solution that was seamlessly able to load a continuous and big stream of data from SAP. The solutions would then have to perform the analysis that fitted their particular needs and policies. Finally, put it into a Dashboard which tracked and reported payable and receivable invoicing KPI of their 16 biofuel production plants and 3 offices located around US and Europe.Solution
ProgresSum´s analysts, business and IT experts assimilated the pains and goals of Abengoa’s Bioenergy team by integrating themselves within one single team. This group powered the design and building of a cloud dashboard solution that is visual, intuitive and easy-to-use. We did this with automated and real time response without the need of accessing and looking into SAP or extracting from it to manipulate in Excel. Alerts, drill-downs and other functionalities were customized to cover the needs of each of the locations that the company has around the world, while being standardized to their corporative culture and rulesResults
For Abengoa Bioenergy the main benefits of this initiative are:- Cash flow improvement that will result from optimizing their payments and receivables.
- Time saving of personnel including a minimum of one controller per plant, one accounts payable employee, one account receivable employee and one AP/AR manager per region. On top of this, a global manager (AP/AR) of both regions, for a total of 25 employees to control AP/AR accounting in Europe and the U.S.
- They required fast reporting for the AP/AR management teams to make better-informed business decisions. Provide the ability to visualize both the big picture and detailed information to make better informed decisions.
- Visibility across the whole invoicing and payment process, trend analysis, and knowledge sharing.
- One single dashboard platform to drive collaboration on internal challenges and opportunities.
- Standardized process that makes management easier and also helps reduce time and cost.
- The scalable architecture of the dashboard not only supports better business today, but also better growth opportunities for tomorrow.