EY helps enable entry at source for a global finance process with Power Platform, reducing lead times by 95 percent

EY is a global organization that employs roughly 300,000 professionals and serves more than 200,000 clients through a complex operational ecosystem. As part of its digital transformation initiatives, EY teams set their sights on improving a core operational pillar of any worldwide organization: global finance. 

The General Ledger (GL) document posting process was prone to errors due to the data transfer steps between different applications. In addition, the person creating the entries and the one processing entries were often separated across time zones and geographies without the use of an integrated tool. This often led to added effort when dealing with tight month-end close deadlines. Depending on the process followed, successful posting in SAP could take longer than a day or two.  

Within the EY organization, approximately 400 global finance professionals prepare and post data modifications within EY GL—hosted by its custom SAP ERP environment—to reflect reality. When a document is ready to be posted, the finance submitter emails it to a manager for approval or rejection. Sometimes the manager asks for more information, in which case the document is manually emailed back to the finance submitter with a request for corrections and/or additions. 

Once approved, the document is reviewed by a vendor to perform data validation. Any data discrepancies found are returned to the EY finance submitter for correction while validated data is electronically transferred by a third-party SAP automation tool that posts documents in the SAP ERP system. 

Ajith Haripaul, EY Global Controlling Transformation Leader, set out to streamline this high-frequency global process with Emil Hovgaard, EY Nordic Tech Hub Leader, who oversees a team experienced in broad business application development within the EY organization. Their intention was to increase efficiency and transparency in the GL document posting process while reducing costs associated with licensing, platform maintenance, and transactional processing fees.   

The overarching goal was to create a more user-friendly experience by building a one-stop shop for EY finance professionals with additional functionalities such as a real-time dashboard, built-in approval workflow, onscreen validation, and improved processing speeds. 

Enabling innovation at scale through fusion development and Power Platform 

Since the EY Nordic Tech Hub already leverages Microsoft Power Platform in its toolset, Emil was familiar with its business application capabilities—its speed to market, low-code customization and configurability, and scalability. With the recent release of Power Platform's pre-built SAP ERP connector, Emil saw an exciting opportunity to rapidly develop a solution to optimize a high-frequency global finance process through synergies between EY, Microsoft, and SAP.   

As Emil describes it, “With Power Platform's SAP connector, we knew we could complete postings relatively quickly if we created an app with Power Apps and used this API to connect to the EY SAP ERP environment." 

To truly understand the GL posting process, Emil partnered with leaders on the respective EY Global Finance and ERP teams. Together, with the assigned EY Nordic Tech Hub members, this fusion of professionals comprised the core team for what is fondly referred to as "Project Zilla" because of the monster scope of the application, its complexity, and the business impact.  

“Fusion development or cross-functional development teams truly enable innovation at scale,” shares Emil. “Pairing specialists from my team with domain experts from the business creates the perfect synergy to deliver innovative solutions.”  

Together, the Project Zilla team determined the necessary requirements to establish the sandbox SAP environment customized to the finance process being reinvented. Once that environment was created, the team set out to test its proof of concept (PoC): to successfully complete a document posting using the newly released connector. 

The team built a simple app with Power Apps with three tables—a header table, a line items table, and a user access table. The header and line items were populated in the user interface. Submitted data was sent to SharePoint for the purpose of the PoC, and once the solution was scaled it would be sent to and stored in Dataverse. The document data submitted to SharePoint triggered a Power Automate flow that executed the SAP connector to write those line items into SAP.  

During this phase, the development team overcame a critical challenge in that its cloud-based Power Platform solution needed a gateway configuration to connect its on-premises ERP database. The EY solution uses Microsoft Data Gateway to address this requirement.  

"It's amazing how quickly we were able to take action with Power Apps," reflects Emil. "Within a couple weeks we had a PoC ready to test, which goes to show that Power Platform is removing the technical barriers that slow down PoC solution development."  

After successfully completing the PoC by making a document posting to the EY SAP ERP system, Emil and the team pitched a business case to EY leadership and secured executive sponsorship to develop what is now called PowerPost—the EY global finance GL posting application. 

Over the next three months, the development team focused its efforts on designing and building a minimum viable product (MVP) and integrating the PowerPost solution with EY global IT infrastructure. Both Daront, EY Nordic Tech Hub Product Manager, and Emil agree that the team's fusion approach to improving business processes and leveraging a Scaled Agile Framework to develop those solutions has been a significant factor in their success. Rather than focusing heavily on what the UI would look like—knowing it would change—the development team put its efforts toward developing functionality and getting user feedback at regular intervals.  

"Power Platform's low-code capabilities help enable our development team to continuously iterate and make custom configurations to our solution based on what end users found most valuable," says Daront. Once team members achieved the desired functionality in PowerPost, they designed a clean, crisp UI experience reminiscent of Excel to aid in user adoption and satisfaction.  

Reinventing a global process with Power Apps improves accuracy, efficiency, experience

With PowerPost, the GL posting process is easier, faster, more accurate, and cost-effective. Rather than preparing hundreds of rows of data in Excel, finance users log into the PowerPost Web app and see a dashboard with relevant information such as pending documents, documents requiring approval, and posted documents. Data access is secured based on user type configurations within Power Apps and Dataverse.  

To create a new document, users click the New Document button, and a new blank document is shown with the required information to create a header and line items. Each input filed is driven by validations using Dataverse tables configured from SAP.  

After the required data is input, the user can click the validate button, which verifies the document has a balanced figure. Depending on their access level, users will be prompted to send the document to an approver or are able to post the document immediately within the PowerPost app. Submitted documents are stored in Dataverse using relational data configurations to track document status by header. 

Once the necessary approvals are made in PowerPost, the document header status changes in Dataverse to indicate the entry is ready for posting. This triggers a Power Automate cloud flow enabled by Microsoft Data Gateway (OnPrem) that prompts the SAP connector to export the data from Dataverse and post into the EY SAP ERP environment.   

Document postings will either be accepted or rejected within SAP, which triggers a Power Automate return output to store this information in Dataverse. Rejected postings will notify the finance submitter in PowerPost to correct the identified error. Otherwise, Dataverse stores a hyperlink within PowerPost for successful postings that allows users to click and see the actual SAP posting.  

Serving as a security control, SAP data in PowerPost is actively maintained in Dataverse. This is achieved by configuring the existing third-party SAP automation provider to periodically push the necessary SAP data to Azure SQL Database (OnPrem). From there, scheduled Microsoft Dataflows query and import SAP data into Dataverse relatively quickly. This workaround enables data accuracy and transparency while also giving users access to a centralized and single data source within PowerPost.  

Anticipating a 30 percent cost reduction

PowerPost's MVP was piloted to 250 users and the initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  

As the solution goes live globally, it's forecasted to reduce operational costs by more than 30 percent—realized in reduced existing license costs and time savings. The reinvention of the GL posting process with PowerPost is also expected to reduce the entire lead time by more than 95 percent. Although PowerPost eliminates the need for Excel spreadsheets and emails in the posting process, EY finance users are still able to upload Excel files into PowerPost and complete their work in that format if they prefer.  

The built-in approval workflow allows countries to customize to their needs and assists in achieving a global best-in-class standard, with improved controls surrounding entries before they are posted. There are also improved access controls in PowerPost to ensure only authorized users are able to post using the company codes they have been granted access to. 

Ajith Haripaul, EY Global Controlling Transformation Leader within the EY Global Finance team, confirms PowerPost has made a significant impact already and there’s considerable demand to roll out the solution to more regions.  

“This is a world-class solution that has been developed by the EY Nordic Tech Hub in collaboration with our ERP teams and Global Finance teams,” says Ajith. “Enabled by Power Platform, PowerPost is a significant improvement to our existing document entry process for the EY organization. We can reduce costs, increase efficiency, reduce our processing time, improve our month-end closing process, and create a better experience for our finance teams.” 

Seeking ways to repeat the magic of innovation at scale with Power Platform 

EY teams have recently deployed PowerPost to 250 additional users across select global regions, and the Project Zilla team will continue to add and improve functionality as it receives user feedback. Daront shares their intent to explore developing Power BI dashboards and reports to continue making data-informed process improvements in Finance and other areas in EY.  

PowerPost is expected to be released to the entire EY Global Finance team in October 2022. 

Going forward, Daront and Emil have talked about opportunities to apply this technology to other business areas outside of finance that use EY’s SAP ERP data because of the availability of Power Platform's SAP connector.  

Innovative EY leaders see how fusion development approach paired with low-code Power Platform capabilities can digitally transform numerous global business processes within EY. As Emil puts it, “Taking the logic and IP we’ve developed with PowerPost paired with Microsoft’s SAP connector, we can digitally transform multiple other global processes within the EY organization. The reinvention and innovation at scale enabled by Power Platform is staggering. The potential is just waiting there to be realized.”  

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