Technology Solutions & Practices Shared Interest Group

Hello everyone,

I've been working on an initiative to bring more transparency and data-driven insight into our financial operations using SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. The goal is to connect our finance workflows with real performance metrics, essentially turning process models into measurable business outcomes.

One challenge I'm currently facing is quantifying the financial value of identified process inefficiencies. For example, when Signavio flags long approval cycles or redundant journal entries, it's not always clear how to translate those findings into a tangible cost or value metric that resonates with finance stakeholders.

I've reviewed some resources, including the C_SIGDA_2403 certification exam content and also explored practice materials from Pass4Future, which helped me understand the analytical capabilities of Signavio. But I'd love to hear from others who have applied process mining tools like Signavio or Celonis in real financial contexts.

How do you define and communicate the financial impact of process improvements in areas like month-end closing, invoice processing, or budgeting cycles? Do you rely on time-based KPIs, cost allocation models, or more qualitative performance indicators?

Any insights, examples, or best practices from your finance transformation experience would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Britanney

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Britanney Wiley
Portland OR
United States
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@Britanney Wiley

Excellent initiative, Britanney — challenging one! Lots of moving qualitative and quantitative parts.

From experience starting up and scaling new divisions and implementing ERP transformations, I’ve found that translating process inefficiencies (like redundant journal entries or long approval cycles) into financial terms often starts with time-to-cost modeling.

For instance, if a process step takes 3 days pre-implementation and 1 day post-implementation, the 2-day delta multiplied by fully loaded labor costs (aggregate or role-specific) gives a tangible efficiency gain. (2 days of salaries that are not just direct cost savings, but also potential other more efficient revenue uses shifted around — 2 days worth of labor devoted to accounting brings X value, but same 2 days that are now saved in accounting and are transitioned over to generating business may prove to be additional revenue on top of savings.) The key is to have clean pre- and post-implementation data and stable operations before running comparisons.

We approached this at the process level — for example, mapping the entire client onboarding cycle from prospect to engagement letter, then to internal onboarding, to initiation of services — then converting time saved into both cost savings and capacity redeployment (e.g., one bookkeeper reallocated to revenue-generating work instead of repetitive processing).

Strong SOP documentation helps establish a baseline for these calculations and provides clarity on ownership and timing — you may find our ( @Renata Serban and myself) recent Strategic Finance article on SOPs useful:
🔗 The Value of Standard Operating Procedures for Small Businesses (IMA SF, July 2024)

To your last question — the most credible way to communicate value is to triangulate:

• Time-based KPIs (cycle reduction, approvals per transaction)

• Cost allocation models (labor + system cost savings)

• Qualitative outcomes (accuracy, error reduction, or stakeholder satisfaction)

Each tells part of the story — and when combined, they resonate with finance stakeholders.

I understand your pain because I've been there — its hard because process metrics (like days, touches, reviews, back and forth email chains, triaging issues to resolution, or steps involved) don’t automatically translate to dollars without a clear costing framework.

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Ilya Ilienko, dual MBA, CPA, CMA
Board Member / Director
East Coast - United States
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Hi @Britanney Wiley

A great exercise to do , especially helps to bring out the clarity on ROI of huge ERP investments.

However when we do this exercise, we need to consider that process automation in itself brings in efficiency by default.

For example an automated bank reconciliation process would provide savings in terms of days ,if not months, but also brings in with it the accuracy in the process of cash application - for example.

However with automation also comes in a few additional technological investments.

To continue with the example of bank reconciliation, selecting the banking partner, should be qualified to do expand his network and ready to share the financial transactions securely.We as a customer should equip ourselves with the required technology(protocols) similarly the banking partner.

This should be treated as capital infrastructure expenditure.

The topic of bank reconciliation is dear to me because , we would still not achieve a 100% hit rate for cash application (for example).

There would still be need for manual checking and verifying.

So whenever we build the process efficiency matrix, we should not ignore the concerns of repeatability, accuracy. Most importantly expandability.

Regards

Eashwar

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Eashwar Seshadri CMA
Director/Manager
IBM India Ltd
Norristown PA
United States
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