Achieve the Highest ROI for Financial Transformation With Cadency^® by Trintech

Boston Scientific Corporation (BSC) is an extremely successful global medical manufacturing company. Their success in several international markets allows them to continuously expand their business with an aggressive acquisition strategy.

However, their primary close approach using spreadsheets and manual processes, couldn’t handle the financial close complexity of their growing business and created many challenges for their Office of Finance.

BSC’s main close complexity challenges included:

• Continually increasing time and effort to support the exponential growth in their workload
• Lack of standardized accounting processes or workflow documentation
• No visibility across finance processes or secure control framework

Without an effective financial close solution, BSC’s finance and accounting personnel were struggling to support the organization’s growth and forward momentum for the future. After evaluating many financial close automation vendors, BSC determined that Cadency^® by Trintech was the best support for their immediate needs, as well as their vision for the future.

5 Benefits Boston Scientific Corporation Gained With Cadency by Trintech

#1: Standardized Accounting Processes

Before implementation, BSC documented and standardized accounting processes so Cadency’s technology platform could enforce workflows and policies that were unique to their organization. As a result, they gained a streamlined integration plan as they continued to acquire companies.

Whenever BSC now acquires companies, they onboard those entities into Cadency as they come in through their SAP^® ERP.

BSC currently utilizes Cadency’s automation capabilities for:

• Automating account reconciliations across 86 entities in 53 countries
• Financial close management across 93 entities
• Journal entry (JE) management across 67 entities in 35 countries

#2: Significant Reduction of Workload

BSC’s processes were primarily spreadsheet-based, and to make the tool work for their close, manual processes were required. When BSC chose Cadency as their comprehensive financial close solution, their workload decreased significantly because they were able to automate a large amount of their close process.

Today, Boston Scientific Corporation houses more than 29,000 accounts within Cadency and more than 4,400 of those accounts are set to auto-reconcile.

Now, BSC’s staff is able to focus on more value-adding, strategic activities, rather than just focusing on completing the close through manual efforts.

“Overall, we’ve seen significant indirect cost savings with Cadency by way of auto-reconciling accounts, risk-stratifying the balance sheet and enabling RPA (Robotic Process Automation) in several instances, taking time out of our finance processes. These result in direct cost savings and capacity increases.” –Global Process Steward of Account-to-Report, Boston Scientific

#3: Support for Financial Shared Service Centers and BPO Provider Relationship

At the time that BSC’s finance and accounting teams realized their current tools and manual processes weren’t sustainable, BSC was in the process of launching their financial shared service centers. Simultaneously, the organization was utilizing a BPO organization for finance and accounting processes— another contributing factor to their financial close complexity.

Because of this, they needed to have a transparent, documented workflow — something that spreadsheets simply lack. BSC also needed visibility across finance processes to ensure that they were controlled and producing accurate data.

When BSC standardized their processes within Cadency, they were able to enforce an optimized finance workflow, gain visibility through dashboards and access an audit trail that documented what was happening in their processes.

Additionally, they maintained their BPO provider relationship because their provider is able to access Cadency remotely.

“During the shift to remote work, teams across the globe, internally and within our BPO, were operating remotely in Cadency with no degradation in performance.” –Global Process Steward of Account-to-Report, Boston Scientific

#4: Reporting on Finance Analytics in Close Process

Cadency also allows BSC’s finance and accounting teams to track and analyze several finance analytics in the close.

Here are a few KPIs BSC monitors today:

• Incomplete account reconciliations per policy
• Unassigned accounts
• Deactivated accounts with a balance
• Timeliness of account reconciliations
• JEs and Close tasks
• Accuracy of account reconciliations and JEs

#5: Continuous Improvement of Finance Best Practices

Because of their experience with Cadency and Trintech’s financial close solution experts, BSC has experienced firsthand that a technology transformation project is a continuous journey; there is always more that can be improved upon not only in the Office of Finance, but in the overall organization to achieve success.

“Now we have the opportunity to embark upon further business transformation initiatives within Cadency, partner with SAP^®, and have companywide support behind us to increase the rate of transformation as we go forward over the next few years.” –Global Process Steward of Account-to-Report, Boston Scientific

Through their financial transformation journey leveraging Cadency by Trintech, BSC has become a trusted partner of their ERP vendor, SAP^®,  for driving accounting best practices and have established a better sense of “the art of the possible” for leading-edge technology, processes and opportunities to implement in the future.

Explore more of Boston Scientific Corporation’s financial transformation journey with the full case study.

Written by: Ashton Mathai