As one of the world’s largest content producers and distributors, Fremantle needs to generate a wide range of monthly, time-critical reports – from royalty statements to stock adjustments – for its global network of partners and clients, creating a significant burden on its finance team and restricting resource for strategic, high-value work.
Recognising its strong track record of using automation to transform the back offices of some of world’s leading brands, Fremantle chose to partner with Arvato to deploy a technology-driven solution that could directly tackle this challenge.
The partnership is playing a central role in transforming our financial services operations. It’s helping us streamline our reporting processes and empower our team members to spend more time on the complex, judgement-based tasks where they can generate real insights and value. Through Arvato’s expertise and close collaboration, we’ve developed a solution perfectly tailored to our specific needs. We’re looking forward to continuing to roll the technology out across more areas of our business.
Gillian Ahluwalia, Finance Director, Fremantle Shared Services
Arvato designed an end-to-end digital automation solution that would transform Fremantle’s monthly reporting functions using ProcessAutomate – a solution that combines the business’ back-office expertise with intelligent automation technology from software specialists Blue Prism.
It uses the software to create an agile, virtual workforce able to mimic human processing of repetitive, labour-intensive tasks. It follows rule-based business processes and interacts with systems in the same way that people do.
After delivering a series of joint workshops to identify the reporting processes most suited to automation, Arvato launched a pilot project that would apply the technology to producer share reporting for Fremantle’s London-based divisions and hedging analysis for each of the 30 territories in the company’s network.
The solution integrates with the business’ financial services software and automatically completes pre-designed report templates, all without error and in a consistent and auditable format.
Following the success of the pilot, Arvato automated the firm’s stock adjustment reports, balance sheet and inter-company reconciliations, and the minimum of 2,500 royalty statements it generates every quarter, which, before automation, would have each taken up to 20 minutes to download the data manually. The statements can now be compiled in minutes.
Arvato’s automation specialists and Fremantle’s finance team worked collaboratively to build a bespoke solution and carried out extensive testing to maximise its performance.
With the system successfully up and running, Arvato continues to actively manage the technology, providing support and monitoring to ensure it is consistently delivering against its objectives, while also reviewing other suitable processes to roll the solution out to.
The combination of Arvato’s back-office expertise and technology has created a successful and scalable automation model that has generated significant results for Fremantle:
