The wine industry is one of the world’s oldest and with that comes rich traditions, craftsmanship and, most importantly, an understanding of what the market wants.

Despite challenges like climate change and keeping pace with customer preferences, the industry has managed to evolve and remain relevant. Key to that has been the way wine producers have embraced innovation, from techniques for making wine to new technology channels for distribution, sustainable wine practices and product diversification.

While most of those innovations may seem forward facing, backend operations such as the finance function have also benefited from innovative ways to remain competitive in a global market.

Automating finance functions

Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) is a global leader, with a portfolio of renowned luxury and premium wine brands enjoyed by consumers in more than 70 countries. Embracing new ways of working has proven to be essential in transitioning from a highly manual finance environment to one with increased automation and efficiency, says Kirsten Jury, TWE global finance service delivery lead.

“We’re still in the early stages of our technology transformation journey, but it is clear the key benefit is that data is available much sooner, enabling quicker visibility and decision making. We’re not real time yet, but we’re certainly moving in that direction,” says Jury.

Seven years earlier, the business started working with BlackLine, the intelligent financial data platform that powers the modern office of the CFO. By transforming raw transactions into strategic insights, BlackLine empowers finance and accounting teams to achieve future-ready financial operations that are accurate, efficient and intelligent.

The partnership has helped TWE manage its finance functions smoothly, however Jury says the business had reached a point where they needed to identify which functions of BlackLine could further enhance and start to implement changes.

“About 18 months ago, we started our journey to automate some important and necessary, but time-consuming finance activities. Our strategy was to leverage the tools we already had in place,” she says. “We quickly realised that BlackLine could help us automate key processes of journals and reconciliations, in particular those that are regular and recurring.”

Over a period of months, the team implemented BlackLine's Transaction Matching module, which significantly reduced the manual tasks the finance team needed to perform on a regular basis, says Jury.

“The results were immediate,” she says.

The team quickly saw a 50% reduction in the volume of manual monthly reconciliations and a 20% decline in the number of manual journals that needed to be prepared, unlocking 300 hours of effort to reinvest in other activities.

Jury cites the example of payroll reconciliations.

“We successfully cut the time to complete two payroll clearing account reconciliations by more than 40 hours, we are achieving a match rate of more than 99% and we have a standardised process in place.”

Understanding your processes

Rather than diving in and automating across the board, TWE looked at all of its processes to determine which ones needed to be improved, before they were included in the scope.

“The implementation required a focus on process optimisation and data quality, before automating,” says Jury. “We took the time to really understand the processes because if you pick a bad process, then you are just automating a bad process.

“In a highly manual environment, every change, every new volume of data, means extra effort. Whereas with the automation we’ve done, it’s just extra data. It’s not extra effort.”

This turned out to be an important lesson. Along with being very clear on the reasons for automating in the first place, Jury says it helped TWE transition smoothly.

“My advice is avoid getting caught in rabbit holes or letting scope creep take over. It’s easy to get distracted by wanting to solve every problem at once,” she says.

Managing the change

Driving change in any organisation comes with its own set of challenges. Often, the trickiest part is not the implementation of a new system but rather bringing people along for the ride.

“The configuration part is easy,” says Jury. “Change management and training is harder – sometimes it is as hard to train people to stop doing things as it is to train them to do them.”

The key to TWE’s success was taking a collaborative approach between the TWE global finance team and BlackLine consultants.

“We drew on BlackLine’s expertise where we needed to but, at the same time, we really focused on making sure the TWE team was building skills, understanding and knowledge, so that we could run future phases ourselves,” she says.

Instead of looking at wholescale automation, TWE took the approach of getting it right for some mundane yet necessary activities, which allowed the finance team to start doing more value-add activities and see the benefit in the new way of working.

“It has enabled them to develop new skills and new ways of thinking. We are now having conversations about how we continue the automation journey,” says Jury.

It has also proved to be an interesting conversation to have with potential new employees who are interested in an organisation with a future-focused approach.

“We’ve received some feedback from prospective employees that it’s rare to find this kind of thinking and opportunity in a back-office finance function,” says Jury.

“The fact that we’ve not only talked about it, but have actually implemented it and shown it’s possible – and are now already focusing on what's next – really sparks interest and makes for great discussions.”

Find out more

BlackLine is a CA ANZ Member Benefits Partner. Learn how you can achieve future-ready financial operations by visiting BlackLine.