Process automation with Djeeni – what do the users say?
Helping Ann, the Accountant
Ann is busy with the accounting tasks of the company. She works with an ERP system but she is still busy with manual data processing tasks. Here is why:
- only the core modules of the ERP system are installed. Some analytics or sub-ledger is maintained outside of the ERP system. It does not matter if they are other IT systems or simple MS Excel workbooks, in the end, Ann has to manually enter some journal entries into the general ledger to complete the bookkeeping. Finn helps with the consolidation of data but Ann has to also make checks. Why Ann or Finn? Why not Djeeni? Djeeni makes these checks quick and without mistakes.
- there is another problem with the above. Excel files are sent mostly via mail. Ann has to open every mail, find the attachment, download and save it to the correct folder. Easy, but human work means human mistakes. Now she lets Djeeni scan through her mailbox for workbooks and sort them into folders.
Helping Finn, the Financial Analyst
Finn, the financial analyst, is busy with:
- helping Ann with month-end close: even with using an ERP system, some financial information is still created and managed by MS Excel, and Finn is responsible to consolidate them in order that Ann can add these journal entries at the end of every month to the general ledger. Finn used to spend every month-end minimum a half-day to make these consolidations. Only if they were all set, there were no data quality issues, and, frankly said, if he did not commit any mistake during consolidation. In such cases, the whole day and even the evening is spent to finalize the consolidation. With Djeeni processes fully automated he is ready within half an hour.
- helping Connie with budgeting: this is tricky. It looks like a repeating task, but year-by-year the processes are slightly changed by Connie to react to market and business changes. Finn had to be very careful to adjust his reports to the needs. He wished if he could remember exactly how he did last year and let Connie control the changes. With Djeeni he can quickly pick up any self-documented and visualized processes to discuss with Connie the changes upfront and then deliver them fast and with ease. Connie also recognises that budgeting goes much smoother since Djeeni is introduced.
- creating forecasts: forecasts are the best when they contain parameters to enable testing of different scenarios. Finn used to make these scenarios manually on several worksheets with always changing requests. It became a nightmare to maintain all the worksheets simultaneously even using a lot of formulas. With a lot of overtime deadlines were still missed. In Djeeni he can design and maintain flexible processes using parameters and generating any number and combination of worksheets fast and simple.
- management reporting / ad-hoc analysis: business becomes agile and managers just come up with business insight needs. Finance has most of the data so financial analysts should satisfy these needs. Finn got a lot of requests and he had to collect the data from several sources that must have been cleaned, prepared, synchronized and transformed before he could even start to analyse or build a report from it. Many of such requests from business were denied as it just took too much time to make them manually. Djeeni has built in functions to speed-up these tasks and once the process is set-up the manual operations need not be carried out again. Finn saves a lot of time and can deliver more ad-hoc reports without extra effort helping the business.
Before Djeeni Finn spent 60% of his working time with manual data processing. Now he can spend more time with analysis and delivering more business insight.
Helping Connie, the Controller
Connie has to ensure that the company is healthy not just from strict finance point of view but also businesswise. She has to ensure that:
- company budget is created using up-to-date, relevant and reliable data to the utmost detail. DJEENI let’s Connie to create more and more detailed data templates for all aspects of the budget as Finance and other departments can handle them faster. It is not a problem anymore to run different scenarios twice or three times without having the risk to miss a deadline.
- forecasts and are supporting the ever faster business: Finance’s capacity has grown with ‘some Djeenis’ so Connie can ask or prepare herself more business insights to make business decisions fact-based.
- (executive) management is well informed about the company’s business situation. She needs to create periodical and ad-hoc reports and presentations. Djeeni automatically synchronizes data coming from MS Excel with other MS Office (MS Word, MS PowerPoint or MS Power BI) saving a lot of manual work for Connie.
Helping Peter, the PMO Officer
Peter is supporting the Project Managers of several projects dealing with project administration. On top of this, he also controls the administration of other PMO colleagues. This is what he has to do:
- report to finance about project related costs: He maintains an MS Excel template that he got from Finn empty and he delivers back to him at the end of every month. Finn comes sometimes back saying that he has filled dates or numbers incorrectly in or made some calculation errors. Then they spend an hour together to find out the reason behind the error. Finn says also that his mistakes are different from other colleague’s mistakes and he has to spend also a number of hours to clean all the worksheets. Peter does his best to control everyone’s worksheet but it is just simply too many records.
- report worked hours: Peter asked all project members to fill their hours in an IT system. He has to transfer these values to finance – summarized and compared with plans. He exports data from the IT system (into MS Excel, of course) and has set up some calculation formulas but they show quite frequent an error message. Again, finding mistakes takes time.
- Peter finds the above problems manageable with minimal overtime. But to do the same with other PMO’s templates and data causes a lot of headache for him.
Since Peter has Djeeni, he can use source control functions of Djeeni to find mistakes automatically. Djeeni also makes all consolidation and data transfer to finance and to the project managers. The project managers and Finn are happy. So is Peter.
More about process automation in MS Excel and DJEENI
