Digital Workflow Management Enables Leading Reinsurer to Improve User Experience for Finance Employees
Accenture and ServiceNow have helped SCOR, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, to transform its internal finance function by digitizing key business processes to improve workflow management and enable real-time reporting.
Previously, many key processes within the finance function, including the quarterly-close process, were conducted manually, using spreadsheets, email and the telephone. This posed a great challenge, given the complexity of managing processes across the company’s more than 100 legal entities spread across six continents.
As part of its work, Accenture helped SCOR implement ServiceNow’s Service Portal and Now Platform as the underlying technology enabling the transformation and simplifying critical business functions. The new system currently handles approximately 30 key finance processes, some of which integrate robotic process automation. The automation has reduced the workload of some processes by as much as 40 days per year.
As a result, employees can spend more time on business-critical functions rather than on labor-intensive administrative tasks. The digitization and consolidation of disparate actions into a single process also improves the auditing process and enhances data security — enabling the company to reduce risk, improve transparency and enhance the user experience for finance personnel.
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Key finance tasks that are now fully automated include:
- entity sign-off for quarterly reporting (including the operating entities, the entities’ chief financial officers, and auditors, among others);
- financial adjustments at the quarter-end closing process, including audit trails; and
- bi-weekly intra-group transactions, enabling the company to collect sign-offs and better facilitate audit trails of transactions.
Employees can also access a 24/7 online portal that serves as a central resource for submitting requests and changes electronically. It includes digital dashboards, which give finance and other staff real-time visibility into the status of each financial process and document and, where appropriate, the ability to provide the necessary sign-off.
“We at SCOR foresaw how ServiceNow could help us achieve the ‘spreadsheet-free’ vision for our finance function,” said Marc Henry, head of finance systems, process & controls, and projects at SCOR. “With its ServiceNow expertise, Accenture has been a valuable partner in helping us build that vision in order to boost productivity, improve how our people work and increase employee satisfaction. Our customers and employees have felt the positive impact of our new state-of-the-art finance function, visible audit trails and real-time reporting capabilities. Our finance transformation is motivating us to continue evolving our business with emerging technologies.”
Ciaran Cosgrave, managing director and ServiceNow practice lead for Europe at Accenture, said, “Reinsurers that deal with significant, complex financial transactions are actively embracing new technologies and modernizing processes. By helping SCOR transform processes using some of the latest digital technologies, we’re also enabling employees to gather meaningful insights generated from robotics and automation. Relieving SCOR’s workforce of burdensome administrative tasks will help the company compete more effectively in today’s data-driven economy.”
