A delivery mechanism for the digital twin

In this series of articles on the use of digital twins in finance and administration, we’ve looked so far at the main stages in their development and implementation – in other words, at business mining, modeling, simulating, and continuous improvement.

In this fifth and final article, we’re going to consider what a Transformation and Innovation Office (TIO) can contribute. I suppose it’s not a stage, as such – at least, not in the sense of the sequence covered in the preceding articles. Instead, the TIO has an important role to play in in driving innovation and continuous improvement in a manageable, quantifiable, and efficient way.

TIO-as-a-service

I should start, of course, by defining terms. Capgemini’s own Transformation and Innovation Office helps clients foster innovation through measuring the value of new ideas and opportunities, become architects of change through improving communication and collaboration, and generate thought leadership through workshops and sharing best practices.

Essentially, it delivers end-to-end transformation and innovation as a service – leveraging the digital twin approach to mining, modeling, simulating, and improving. This, in turn, helps clients transition to – what we call – the Frictionless Enterprise.

We work closely with client organizations to identify opportunities to innovate; to engage with process teams and get their buy-in; to communicate best practice from across industry; and to determine how that best practice might be tailored to circumstances.

In previous articles in this series, I described how the development and implementation of digital twins for business processes should be seen as cyclical, rather than linear, and this is the principle that underpins our TIO. Its core framework comprises this circle of steps:

• Idea generation – using business mining and our process engineering approach to map “as-is” processes, to start streamlining them, and to capture ideas for innovation
• Modeling and simulation – using the BusinessOptix platform to design the architecture of the digital twin, and to build the business case for the “to-be” model, including metrics for success
• Complexity and prioritization – assessing anticipated changes implicit in the “to-be” model, managing them, establishing priorities for implementation, and prioritizing against all other ongoing transformation in the pipeline
• Innovation pipeline – signing off on initiatives, and developing and initiating a project management approach
• Implement – rolling out the transformation, providing project status updates, and re-prioritizing remaining pipeline activities as necessary
• Measure – assessing benefits against the predetermined metrics, and feeding them back into the process engineering database in the first stage above, as part of the commitment to continuous improvement.

Improving in action – a global entertainment business

Applied to finance processes, digital twins offer a real opportunity. In the light of growing online competition, this global entertainment organization needed to make significant changes to its business model. It took advantage of the Transformation and Innovation Office approach to bring together SAP workflow automation and robotic process automation, as well as KPI dashboards and CFO insights. To achieve all this, our TIO team worked closely with the organization, supporting operations in locations across North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

Services delivered include cash apps, billing, invoice digitization, report elimination, disputes RPA, recon automation, and overall enterprise financial services.

Since its introduction, 41 projects were implemented across three process towers, and $16.9m savings were delivered in 2020–2021.

Purchase-to-pay (P2P) outcomes have included:

• 80% improvement in optical character recognition (OCR) efficiency
• 95% reduction in process exceptions
• 48% improvement in Days Payable Outstanding (DPO)

Record-to-analyze (R2A) outcomes have included:

• 22% savings on billing
• 70% automation of ad hoc journal entries
• 45% improvement in turnaround time in reconciliation preparation

In general, the TIO is felt to have proven itself to be resilient to changing business priorities, and it continues to retain its efficacy, despite the “new normal” ways of working.

To learn more about how the digital twin can help your organization to drive improved business operations and transition to the Frictionless Enterprise, contact: elle.sanchez-cardenas@capgemini.com  

Elle Sanchez Cardenas creates target operating models for finance and accounting with an automation first focus to improve transaction cycles, reduce manual effort, and increase capacity within teams. She also designs end to end transformations from process and policy enhancements to touchless processing.