8DECEMBER 2020IN MYOPINIONBy Mary Terese Agoglia Hoeltzel, Senior Vice President Tax, and Global Chief Accounting Officer, CignaMajor Challenges and Trends affecting the Financial Control and AutomationMany large corporations were created through acquisition, and gradually we bought our systems together. The workforce is relatively tenured here at CIGNA, and everyone is accustomed to using excel; it is the way that many of these processes have grown up, and it's the tool of choice that most people are trained on and can use. So you have an organization that has these excel spreadsheets that need to be automated. Some of the excel spreadsheets downloads are automated, and some of its attached with manual uploads and downloads, but there's no consistent framework across the organization. And because of that, the likelihood of somebody making a mistake with a formula and so on becomes high. Besides, as the organization grows, people need to be familiar with these complex spreadsheets which they're not. There's a lot of training involved that also makes way for a lot of errors, and it's not the most efficient and effective way to run a company. So the biggest issue is efficiency, and our control environment is vulnerable as a result of this.As a result, companies are looking to automation tools to see how they can automate these processes, enhance their controls, and make the workforce more efficient and effective. And importantly, the one other thing that it does besides enhancing the control and making the workforce more efficient and effective is it can also provide individuals the opportunity to work on more analytical type work, which adds value to the business. Effective way to shift from working on excel to adapting to RPAFirstly, you have to create awareness about all the new tools out there such as Alteryx, Microsoft DirectX, Python, and so on. So you need to get an inventory of these tools and understand can people be trained to use these tools, For instance, can the new kids coming out of school be trained OR have they been trained. If not, what percentage of my workforce is new and can use these tools, and can I invest in these tools so that a broader amount of my population can be trained in these tools. Next, we hired an outside firm to come in and help us look at processes that we felt we knew is critical. These are the processes where we have the most amount of excel spreadsheets, and we have the most significant internal control risk. Then design the to be process as to where and what tools we can use along the way to automate these different elements of these processes. This will free up people to be redeployed to do analytical work to provide better data to the front end of the business. But in doing so, we are encountering an issue, which is change management. People have spent decades with these excel spreadsheets, and they're comfortable using that. Now, if we say, let's move to another tool, then the change management element of this is difficult. It is affecting people about how they feel about their work and being comfortable at their workplace. Strategies for Evaluating Solution ProvidersWhen you see consulting firms are investing or underwriting specific tools, their reputation is on the line as they need to know that tool upside down and inside out. And they also HOW AUTOMATION IS CHANGING THE FACE OF FINANCE
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