WNS Holdings - Best New Endpoint Security Management Solution

Company: WNS Holdings (P) Ltd., Mumbai, India
Company Description: WNS (Holdings) Limited (NYSE: WNS) is a global Business Process Management (BPM) leader. WNS offers business value to 300+ clients around the world by combining operational excellence with deep domain expertise in key industry verticals, including banking and financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, media and entertainment, consulting and professional services, retail and consumer
Nomination Category: Product & Service Categories - Business Technology Solutions
Nomination Sub Category: Endpoint Security Management Solution

Nomination Title: GL Gateway Solution

If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:

The General Ledger (GL) Gateway is a brand-new product developed in-house by WNS and launched in August 2020.

The General Ledger (GL) Gateway tool has been developed and deployed in-house to automate the manual process of recording Journal Entries and ensuring they are posted in a timely manner. The process was largely dependent on central team.

The traditional method of creating Journal entries where location specific Finance SPOCs create and send them to the central GL team for loading into Oracle EBS was riddled with various problems. The two major challenges faced were –

-high dependency on the central team (typically located in different time zones in a global organization like WNS);
-and unnecessary additional layers of to-and-fro communication due to discrepancies and tracking requirements by local teams

The GL Gateway tool has completely metamorphosed the entire process from start to finish and enabled local and central teams to focus on strategic imperatives rather than operational tasks.

It has enabled the following: Self-entry of journal data into a JE template which is constantly refreshed with reference data such as ledger / category / account / project.

-Auto validation and error identification applied at the users’ end itself for missing / wrong / mismatched entries
Approval workflow in the system for manual provisions
-Scheduled data push into GL interface table (Oracle Staging Table)
-Auto-creation of folders with a link with the GL gateway and upload of evidence into SharePoint
-Scheduled import into Oracle from GL interface where it is validated by the central GL team
-Email notification of journal posting status to the user and GL team
-Audit trail and processing details against a system generated JE Tracking ID available to the user

A GL Gateway dashboard is also available for users and the GL team with details of inbound journals, approval status, program execution history, error logs and status of SharePoint connection.

With local finance SPOCs being enabled via self-entry, validations, workflows, schedulers and a detailed execution / error tracking dashboard, the erstwhile to-and-fro process of communication has been significantly reduced. Besides streamlining the entire process flow, this has helped the GL team to completely shift its focus from manual JE posting work to carrying out JE analytics.

The GL Gateway has eliminated an entire ‘maker’ layer thereby reinstating focus on analysis and enhancing efficiency. Team members are equipped and motivated to work on analytics rather than remain engaged in transactional processing and communications alongside high work pressure. Early stage validations ensure timely completion and reduce dependency on the maker towards the last book closing day.

The solution has helped in achieving an estimated savings of ~USD 30,000 per year in the central GL team and ~2 critical days during the month end closure are saved due to this automation. Further, RPA has helped in processing of Multi Ledger Templates. This has brought an efficiency of 8-10 hours for each user (on an average there are 8- 10 such users). Now, it takes only an hour to upload such entries. Additionally, license costs have also been saved as this is a customized solution and teams do not use Oracle directly now. Each license costs approximately ~USD 5,000.

More importantly, as accounting has spread across geographies with various time zones, there is no dependency on the central team, which was also the ask from the local teams earlier. Internal users have received the tool enthusiastically since it has drastically reduced time lost over email follow-ups, clarifications and confirmations. User teams can now record entries as per their time while entries get interfaced to Oracle and a dashboard is made available to all users to monitor their journal entries in a seamless manner.

GL Portal Process.docx – This provides a few snapshots of the process / GL Gateway

GL Gateway Solution Details.docx – This provides details of the solution implemented