From Digital Finance Transformation to Success with BlackLine

Digital transformation is one of the highest priorities for modern businesses. Driving efficiencies and improving productivity empowers organisations to compete more effectively in the modern marketplace. For the best results, businesses often prioritise digital transformation efforts that best benefit external customers, with finance and accounting (F&A) teams and processes often taking a back seat.

However, organisations are increasingly shining the spotlight on the F&A function to improve internal processes and free up valuable time to empower F&A teams to contribute to more high-value, mission-critical tasks, ultimately benefiting their internal customers: the C-suite. Digital transformation journeys that prioritise the F&A function are becoming more important as they expedite processes and mitigate undue stress on F&A staff.

At our recent Finance Transformation Series event in Singapore, we sat down with three BlackLine customers—Maxeon Solar, P.J. Lhuillier, and Singtel—to discuss how organizations can drive continued business success through automation and digital transformation journeys that prioritise the F&A function.

Maxeon Solar started its digital transformation journey with BlackLine 18 months ago to unlock the true value of its financial professionals and deliver greater scalability to the organisation more broadly.

Lai Ping Wong, Corporate Controller, Senior Director, at Maxeon Solar, said, “We are already invested in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that gives us a single source of truth; however, we wanted to do even more, even faster, to drive greater efficiency in our F&A processes. There are so many tasks and priorities that need to be completed in a day and we wanted to release precious time for our finance personnel to do the things that add value to the business.

“BlackLine is a game-changer. Within 6-9 months since implementing BlackLine, we were already seeing real progress in our processes, realizing the benefits of our continued digital transformation. Directly comparing our processes from before and after, we saw significant improvement in efficiency and time management. We were completing reconciliations and transaction matching in much shorter timeframes, improving turnaround time and accuracy, and realising savings of 15-20%. This empowered our team and delivered greater job satisfaction as well as a much-improved work-life balance.”

P.J. Lhuillier Group of Companies is a multi-industry company that owns and operates business dealings with financial services. It is the proud parent company of Cebuana Lhuillier, the Philippines’ leading and largest micro financial service provider specialising in pawning, remittance, micro insurance and micro savings.

The PJLI Shared Services Center (SSC) was established to support more than 30 entities in the organization with 450 resources. Digital transformation is the biggest business agenda to enable the company to compete expeditiously without being inhibited by manual processes.

In an effort to standardise its processes and technology solutions, P.J. Lhuillier started its digital transformation, moving to a new ERP system in April 2022 to run its accounting processes, procurement, and supply chain. Today, 9 of its 30 entities are live with SAP S/4HANA . The next phase of its transformation involved implementing BlackLine.

Ruth Viray, First Vice President and Group Head, Shared Services Center, said, “While it’s typical for large companies to have manual processes, we need to innovate and automate to keep up with the competition. BlackLine’s Transaction Matching solution has empowered our accounting personnel to transition from simple transaction matching roles to financial analysts that can help our organisation make faster, more strategic business decisions.

“Across our multi-industry company, we see 50-60 million matching transactions per month. While BlackLine is only live with 9 products to date, we’re seeing an average reconciliation rate of 99.95%  at each month’s end close. This is a huge benefit realisation as automating reconciliation with BlackLine has enabled the SSC accounting team to invest more time into uncovering critical insights which cause discrepancies and variances. This level of digitisation and transformation has been a game-changer for P.J. Lhuillier.”

After investing in digital transformation efforts that empowered its customer-centric operations teams to drive greater efficiencies across the business, Singtel turned its attention to the F&A function to better empower its team to support its internal customers. With about 60 legal entities in SAP, Singtel recognised that it was only using BlackLine for a portion of its potential and wanted to restart and rebuild its investment to realise more benefits from the solution.

Ming Jir Tee, Vice President, Finance Transformation and Shared Services, said, “Digital transformation should never be only about the technology; it must be how people, processes, and technology work together to drive efficiencies. For example, when we started to transition away from using physical cheques, we set our sights on completely phasing out their usage by 2025. We began by revising the payment policy to be cheque-free and informing users of the change before doubling down on digital transformation and simplifying processes to get the best benefits out of our solutions. The journey of a thousand steps starts with the first step, and that first step should be getting the right people, processes, and technology on the same page to walk the journey together. Getting the fundamentals right is critical.

“Technology partners like BlackLine are an integral part of our transformation journey. They bring fresh thinking and solutions to help eliminate errors, significantly streamlining our transaction matching processes and driving efficiency on accounts reconciliation.”

BlackLine prioritises the delivery of increased efficiency and automation that lets modern F&A teams contribute more to business success. Our goal is to free up finance professionals to do more strategic work by giving them back valuable time.

To take the next step in your digital transformation journey, contact BlackLine today.