Windsor is one of Ireland’s leading providers of new and used cars. With a strong focus on innovation and continuous improvement, Windsor wanted to streamline and automate business-critical processes and digitally transform and automate their finance, accounts payable  and vehicle stock-taking functions. As part of the project, Convergent’s solution automated critical finance business processes such as invoice data entry, data matching, and approvals – processes that are typically manual, time-consuming, and largely paper-based. This automation project was part of an overall Digital Transformation Strategy that Windsor rolled out within their organisation.

Vehicle stock-taking was a manual, time-consuming, and frustrating task where a staff member had to log the vehicle identification number, or VIN, for each vehicle, in each of their locations regularly. And when the VIN data was eventually gathered, it then had to be manually entered into the vehicle management system so other finance processes could be triggered.

All of this meant that Windsor staff were tied up in manual, resource-hungry tasks that resulted in a slow feed of information to the finance team.

Enabling vehicle information to flow quickly, easily, and securely were key requirements for Windsor, and Convergent designed and implemented a simple, yet highly effective solution:

• First, a photo is taken of the VIN number for each vehicle and this data is automatically captured and extracted.
• This data then flows to the vehicle management system so the finance team can deal with any anomalies.

This solution is specific to Windsor and their vehicle stock-taking process, but it shows how any business-critical process can be transformed when the boundaries to information flow are dissolved.

Commenting on the solution, Peter Nicholson, Windsor’s Managing Director, stated, “The visibility and control that we will have over our accounts payable information and processes, and our procurement process in general, will deliver huge benefits to our organisation.  We anticipate that invoice approval times will drop considerably which will improve internal controls and risks as well as greatly assisting in the preparation of our monthly management accounts. By creating additional time for our finance team, we will empower them to shift focus to reducing costs rather than processing them.”

Commenting on this finance automation project, Niall McConnell, Managing Director of Convergent stated, “Working with Windsor is exciting and interesting because it shows the need and appetite for organisations like Windsor to constantly evolve and innovate to maintain and gain a competitive advantage. Finance Automation is only one aspect of a successful Digital Transformation strategy and we’re seeing a huge demand for our other solutions, such as Information Management, GDRP Compliance, and Business Process Automation for HR and other business functions.”