SITUATION
A big-box retail chain with thousands of locations throughout North America had been working on a sweeping digital transformation. For the company, it was a multiyear effort to create a seamless digital customer experience. A top objective was to empower the finance and accounting controllership team with automation and analytics tools and techniques, enabling them to move away from legacy, manual processes toward efficiency and a competitive edge. The goal: a digital overhaul focused on individual team members that allows them to design and access their own real-time, automated views of critical information so they’re able to play a more strategic role.
Prior to the retailer’s current digital transformation efforts, leaders had worked to transform enterprise applications, but the upgrades were not reaching every corner of the business to fully meet the needs of the high-growth company. They started over on a project-by-project basis, modernizing each area as they progressed.
The controllership was the next big opportunity. Management historically relied on time-intensive, manual spreadsheets but was aware of the opportunities automation techniques could provide. The dream outcome: each associate on the controllership team would be empowered to independently imagine and execute new ways to get efficient with data—a concept PwC calls “citizen-led automation.”
RESULTS
In a matter of weeks, the retailer was able to introduce capabilities that could remove thousands of hours of manual processes per year. Additionally, the company enabled faster decision-making with more robust and current data. More importantly, it set the precedent for the controllership team to begin a full “citizen automation” mindset shift.
As an example, reconciliations of payments in the core ERP platform were done daily in a manual, spreadsheet-managed process. Leveraging Alteryx and the cloud data platform, this process was automated from taking approximately 1,000 hours on an annual basis to minutes via the Alteryx automation.
In a short trial of only six weeks, the company moved from planning to action, increasing employee productivity and morale for 100% of use cases identified by process champions. The team extended its efforts through an additional phase of work to achieve the following results in a matter of months:
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