Essar Establishes Financial Shared Services Center

The SAP document management implementation helped us make better use of our resources and balance the workload. We’ve also lowered costs and accelerated processes, improved data quality, strengthened risk management and enhanced visibility. Capgemini helped us meet our time and budget targets. The implementation was a success because of the alignment of business and IT. Executive sponsorship was strong and visible. It was a symphony, rather than a stand-alone IT project – users plus IT, working together to deliver business value.

Dr. Paritosh Basu, Group Controller, Essar Group

The Situation

Essar Group, a diversified multinational with a balanced portfolio of assets in the steel, energy, power, communications, shipping, infrastructure and Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) businesses, was looking to bring the processing of more than 30,000 financial documents generated by its business units every month into one central processing center. The group wanted to establish a Shared Services Center (SSC) for Finance and Administration that would cover Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Banking, Tax and General Ledger spanning 41 account entities.

Capgemini was chosen to implement a document management and workflow solution to support the company’s ambitious growth plan.

The Solution

The primary objective of the solution was to automate the flow of information and documents in an electronic form to a central financial shared services center for transaction processing and accounting, helping to bridge the enterprise information gap and facilitate central processing. Capgemini implemented SAP document management software for managing documents. The team designed suitable SAP workflow templates to address processing requirements as per shared services design. Further, they integrated an interface scanning solution with SAP to ensure seamless movement of document flow and intermediate validation facility.

The Result

“Sixteen months into our implementation, we have already recovered 50% of our investment,” says Mandeep Singh, Senior Vice President with Aegis (an Essar Group Company). “The SAP document management implementation helped in bringing routine accounting processes onto one platform,” says Dr. Paritosh Basu, Group Controller at Essar. “These functions had been performed at numerous locations across India. Now we have a single, centralized system for document management, workflow, and storage across the entire group. The SAP software helped us make better use of our resources and balance the workload. By automating the creation of SAP document information records, we’ve eliminated human intervention, saving time and effort. We’ve also lowered costs and accelerated processes, improved data quality, strengthened risk management, and enhanced visibility into financial accounting.”

Milind Joshi, Senior Vice President of IT services at Aegis says, “The document management implementation helped us harmonize processes and create a common document repository. This has improved employee efficiency, simplified document retrieval, and enhanced traceability for audits.”