Case Studies

Equity Investment Report Automation

A Global Oil & Natural Gas Exploration/Production Company employs a team of Financial Analysts each month to close out all projects from the previous month and run queries on project cash flows. Using finance department applications and a business warehouse system in SAP, this important process includes: running a variety of reports for the internal audit department, high level cash flow monitoring, cash flow reporting checks, distribution of the internal Investment Roll Forward Schedule, and signing off on the equity and cost investments for projects. The main purpose of this Equity Investment Report (EIR) process is to determine the ROI and overall “worthiness” of each project the company executes. At the end of the process, the team is also tasked with deciding whether to close out a project or continue to pursue it throughout the upcoming month. This process takes the team of inancial Analysts 10 days at the end of each month to complete it and requires 20-30 hours of overtime for each team member throughout this period.

Each day of the process involves the analysis of different projects. Day 1 involves the clean-up and closing of projects from the previous month, and prep for the next nine days of Project ROI calculations. Days 2-9 involve gathering data, running queries, and analyzing project equity. To automate this lengthy and crucial process Accelirate implemented an Automation that aligns with the corresponding tasks the Analysts originally had to carry out each day.

Day 1

  1. Clean up and Prep: The Bot Opens all the necessary systems and applications for the EIR process, cleans out any files from the previous month’s analysis, does maintenance and installs any updates needed in the necessary programs, and prepares each system for the 9 days of analysis to follow.

Days 2-9

  1. Pull Previous Months Data: The Bot logs into the necessary systems, pulls 16 different files for each individual project reviewed that day and moves each file to the appropriate application location for analysis.
  2. Run BI-Analyzer: The bot logs into SAP and overwrites the numbers logged last analysis period with current data. The bot then runs the BI-Analyzer (Business Intelligence Analyzer) feature to determine project progress and note differences between the new data and old data.
  1. Calculate costs: The bot uses the numbers generated in the BI-Analyzer to run cost calculations and gather further information for the final report.
  2. Confirm costs:The bot matches the project outcome and/or project progress in terms of a dollar amount with the amount spent as recorded by the finance department and highlights discrepancies.
  3. Export Data and Build Report:Bot exports recorded costs of the previous month from SAP and gathers the calculated costs from the current month ending and places it all into a formatted excel report.
  4. Send Report and Status to Finance Department:The excel report is attached to an email and sent to the finance department at the end of each analysis day along with the “completed” status and project file location. The finance department then verifies the analysis outcome and approves the bot’s decision to refinance the project again for the upcoming month based on the calculated project ROI.

This Accelirate Automation Solution not only ensures accurate results for each project the client analyzes but has also saved their employees the overtime hours needed to originally complete the process. |