Five years ago, the concept of financial automation was not necessarily high on the list of priorities for most companies. Today, as organizations continue to prioritize resources, it has become critical to find efficient solutions to maximize output, and automation presents an intriguing opportunity. For the finance discipline at Smucker, we have been on a journey to evaluate the tool, investigate how we could most effectively integrate automation into our processes and, finally, to implement.

Following a deep dive into how automation could be utilized at Smucker, our team built three bots, which they affectionately call Rosie, Voltron and Rob. These bots supplement critical work to not only unlock time and talent to give our team the opportunity to focus on higher-value work, they have also helped us improve accuracy and compliance.

As we continue to explore opportunities with automation, we will evaluate how to manage a continuous close process, giving us the ability to “close the books” almost every night. In addition to the enhanced accuracy and confidence this will allow, it will also provide critical data we can utilize in near-real time to support predictive forecasting.

Along with enhancing our processes, the continued importance of automation has expanded the skill set of those we are looking to add to the team.

In addition to exceptional finance and accounting expertise, we now are interested in candidates that offer a broad skill set including statistical expertise, data analysis and even storytelling acumen to help us turn analytics into actionable insights.

This has not only allowed us to realize a greater diversity of talent across the finance organization, it has also inspired our group’s commitment to continuous improvement.

I am incredibly proud of the work our team has put forward to thoughtfully integrate automation and their continued focus on opportunities to enhance and extend the benefits we can derive from this critical tool.