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Adept Commissions White Paper on How Augmenting Spreadsheet Systems Can Enable Finance Departments to Reduce the Cost of Financial Operations, Enable More Responsive Business Decision-Making, Provide Valuable Data-Driven Insights and Open New Business Models

Kuala Lumpur, 5^th September 2019 — Adept Enterprise Solutions, a leading financial performance management and analytics solutions consulting firm in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, has announced the availability of a new “proof of value” white paper which explores the time and cost saving that ASEAN businesses could potentially achieve through spreadsheet augmentation.

The white paper, delivered by AOPG Insights, the IT and tech market research business unit of Asia Online Publishing Group Sdn Bhd, also takes a dive into how departments that were considered “overhead” in the pre-digital transformation era, such as finance, can become a net contributor to the business by making smarter use of data and digital technology platforms.

Spreadsheets have long been seen as a valuable tool for finance and accounting departments, used mainly for business analytics, financial analysis and reporting. Nevertheless, as businesses become increasingly digital, complexity inevitably grows and as a result, over-reliance on many of the tried and tested – albeit highly manually-intensive and isolated – spreadsheet-based processes can actually be counter-productive when it comes to digital economy-based operations.

For instance, a finance clerk may commonly need to manually review a company’s spreadsheets for accuracy and errors, consolidate those spreadsheets before (again, manually) pulling data for reporting and closing activities, review the currency of data, and load it into other financial systems. According to Adept’s case studies, the hours a finance clerk spends on manual spreadsheet tasks each year equates to cost businesses, on average, around RM9000 per year per clerk.

These numbers can quickly stack up and in a finance team of just ten people, for instance, companies could be looking at losing over 4000 personnel hours (or RM90,000) each year to spreadsheet administration-related tasks.

In order to truly embrace digital transformation, businesses need to eliminate as much manual, repetitive work as possible so the team can instead focus on higher-level tasks that will greatly benefit the company. It is about harmonising business processes to ensure that the processes are optimised, carried out quickly and efficiently while reducing errors. Tasks, as well as the underlying data, must also shift from being department-specific, siloed and highly manual to being more streamlined, integrated and strategically automated.

The white paper does not only make a strong case for why finance departments need to augment and enhance their spreadsheet usage, but also offers expert suggestions on how they can dramatically improve the productivity of the time their staff spend when undertaking spreadsheet related tasks – focusing on key areas such as User Resistance & Retraining, Adopting a Functional Database Model, General Ledger Integration, Gaining Valuable Insights and Overcoming Wider Integration Issues.

Most importantly, the white paper shares how next-generation technology and solutions can help businesses be more future-ready and harness existing spreadsheet skills while bringing them into the new, digital era.

To download the white paper titled “Time and Cost Saving Analysis: Adept Financial Performance Management Solutions – Spreadsheet Augmentation”, click here.

For more information, contact:

Name: Audrey SL Wong

Job Title: Director

Company: Adept Enterprise Solutions Sdn Bhd

Email Address: audrey.wong@adeptenterprise.com

Office Contact Number: +603-7625 2426 or +6012-310 1245 (Mobile)

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