"As part of a modernisation of our complete banking & payment infrastructure GLS was looking to enhance the bank statement processing in SAP. The infrastructure in place was initially setup 20 years ago, highly customized inside of SAP and no longer fit for purpose due to the increased complexity of our business and exploded volumes. This led to 250+ support tickets a year in recent years with our SAP team for support on issues with the loading and processing of bank statements.
- Seamless integration into SAP
- no sharing of data "via the cloud"
- finance user in control
- total cost of ownership
- and knowledgeable team at BPI
After comparison of 3 SAP embedded tools for Automatic Cash Application we have decided for EBS Workbench. The key decisive factors for us to choose BPI:
Initially we opted to roll out EBS Workbench to only 7 group companies, but after the initial results and the gained efficiencies we decided to roll this out as a strategic solution for our 29 entities on SAP. Our company is very decentral organized, and this is the first solution that is really embraced group wide and allowed us to harmonize the reconciliation processes.
The flexibility EBS Workbench offers, is unparalleled compared to other solutions we considered and at a fraction of the price. The use of various built-in features, the possibility to integrate remittance advices and to clear intercompany payments automatically have been used extensively and offer us a lot of benefits in terms of daily operations.
The key users in the finance departments are fully in control of their reconciliation and can do most of the configuration themselves, relieving our already very strained SAP IT team.
At the same time, we completed the migration from MT940 to CAMT.053 for the banks that support this. In EBS Workbench the switch from MT940 to CAMT.053 is very easy and straight forward. For some entities we switched formats overnight without any issues. CAMT.053 vs MT940 gives us 5-10% more automation due it's more detailed and structured information.
Overall bank reconciliation automation across the group has increased from around 60% to about 85+%. In some countries we're able to achieve 95+% full automation.
The implementation of EBS Workbench has also paved the way for our S/4 HANA migration which will be a lot easier due to the way EBS Workbench operates. A great benefit is also that we were able to retire all custom specific enhancement coding that had been implemented at GLS over the last 20 years.
The support from BPI has been exceptional and invaluable. Their extensive knowledge of SAP FI is something that we value very much. Some minor tweaks to our daily operations inside SAP FI, lead to saving hours daily on tasks related to reconciliation and further posting in SAP FI."
Herman van Hazendonk, Director Group Treasury, General Logistics Systems (GLS), Netherlands