Resolving Challenges in Finance

DSV A/S (“DSV”) is a Danish transport and logistics company that offers global transport services by road, air, sea, and train. The company was founded in 1976 and has since grown to become a leading global supplier of transport and logistics solutions, with operations in more than 80 countries and a workforce of over 75,000 employees. DSV’s services include supply chain management, warehousing, and customs clearance, among others.

DSV decided to further optimize and transfer their treasury function together with infiniance by replacing their legacy Treasury Management System.

At the heart of this transformation was the implementation of the SAP HANA Treasury and Risk Management, and SAP HANA Cash Management modules. The challenge was clear: DSV needed to break free from the constraints of manual processes and disjointed systems that were stifling its potential.

The collaboration with seasoned treasury IT consultants from infiniance was a key enabler for a successful implementation. Together, we embarked on a mission to integrate cash management, market rate management, and trading platform integration into a cohesive, streamlined operation. The goal was clear: to achieve end-to-end automation and free up valuable resources previously bogged down by manual interventions.

DSV archived significant benefits following the implementation. With all accounting now posted by a central back office and payments settled automatically within SAP, DSV experienced a liberation of time and resources across all markets. The native integration between the SAP treasury module and the SAP FI module brought about a newfound synergy, enhancing data accuracy and control.

But the transformation didn’t stop there. Guarantee management, once a cumbersome task managed in Excel, is in on its way to seamlessly being transitioned to SAP, handling hundreds of guarantees with unprecedented efficiency. The implementation of automatic mirror dealing for major product types, along with the increased segregation of duties, fortified the company’s control framework.

The introduction of Fiori apps ensured a very good user experience and provided real-time insights and proactive notifications for necessary actions.

It was decided to set up an ambitious plan and implement the project in 7 months including the summer break period. The cash management scope was kept light to make a rapid deployment possible. Furthermore, there was a requirement from DSV IT to keep custom development to a minimum while meeting the requirement from the treasury function. The project team worked well together and finished the project on time with minimal custom development.

The project is a testimony that you can support very advanced functionality like end to FX exposure management and guarantee management without the need to do custom development.

As DSV looks to the future, it stands on the solid ground of a treasury operation that is not only more efficient but also more strategic. The fully automated internal processes, from automatic accounting to automatic balance sheet FX hedging, have set the stage for a treasury that is not just a support function but a strategic partner in the company’s growth.

Danske Commodities (DC) is an independent, international energy commodities trading house with focus on electrical power, gas and climate certificates via Exchanges, OTC and bilaterally covering physical as well as financial products.

As DC foresaw a continuing increase in their commercial trading volume as well as higher complexity, they decided they needed a scalable treasury management system (TMS) to replace their in-house built solution. To find the right solution, DC engaged infiniance to run a TMS selection process. The task was to envision an optimal future state treasury solution for Danske Commodities covering both technology, as well as processes and organizational aspects.

infiniance carried out an analysis defining DC high-level requirements and based on these and infiniance’s wide experience in the TMS market held them up against the capabilities of the various TMS solutions. A shortlist of providers was the foundation for an invitation to a more detailed RFP. With the RFP feedback in place, a business case and vendor presentations (Proof of Concept) were the basis for a final proposal to DC to decide.

The advantages for DC using infiniance in the selection process; infiniance knew the TMS market and the system providers, their strengths and their weaknesses in relation to the specific requirements, infiniance knew the interaction between processes and systems, infiniance has done the selection process many times and refined it to a template which gives speed, efficiency and less time consuming for DC. And as infiniance is an independent advisor, DC could trust that the final recommendation would be completely unbiased.

Vestas is the energy industry’s global partner on sustainable energy solutions. Vestas designs, manufactures, installs, and services wind turbines across the globe, and with more than 108 GW of wind turbines in 80 countries, they have installed more wind power than anyone else.

Vestas and infiniance consultants have had a long relationship all the way back to 2010 when SAP Treasury & Risk Management was originally implemented.

Since then infiniance have among other things delivered an full-scale in-house bank (SAP In-house Cash), and more recently, infiniance has been an integral part of Vestas’ ongoing treasury improvement initiatives, focusing on increasing operational efficiency and straight-through-processing in the treasury department.

The tasks included a fully automated integration of FX and deposit trades from Bloomberg’s trading platform FXGO, support of a CLS project, and latest, the implementation of non-deliverable forwards (NDF), automating the otherwise manual fixing and settlement of monthly transactions. This has led to huge operational benefits in the treasury, as well as reducing the risk of errors.

Working in smaller, dedicated teams with key Vestas resources on well-defined tasks, has proved successful with agile execution and faster timer-to-market of new initiatives as the result.

AAK has more than 140 years’ experience of innovating and customizing solutions based on vegetable oils and fats. In close collaboration with their customers, they create products for the food, confectionery, and cosmetics industries.

AAK has 20 different production facilities, sales offices in more than 25 countries with sales in more than 100 countries, and more than 3,900 employees. For more information about AAK: www.aak.com

AAK and infiniance have a long-standing relationship in supporting Treasury and Bank related processes.

In 2019 AAK changed their Bank and Cash Management structure, and in relation to this it was decided to implement one common global process for all payments and bank accounting, focusing on operational efficiency, increased security, automation and straight-through-processing (STP).

The objective of the project was to have one global process across all markets in AAK for payments and bank accounting by providing business new tools and standardization of processes with a high degree of automation and fulfilling standards of security with certification of payment files between back-end systems and the banks.

The first step of the project was to establish standard bank connectivity using SWIFT Alliance Lite2 (AL2) for communication of payment files, bank statements and payment status reports (PSR) with external banks.

For payments, STP with payment approval workflows and end-to-end payment monitoring was established, with a high degree of security and compliance on transmission of payments to external banks. All payment files were done following ISO20022 CGI standards. Processes were aligned with a single STP of payments to comply with today’s standards for efficient and effective processes and ensuring security mechanism of payment files, where users can monitor status of payments closely from initiation of payment, through approval, to acceptance of payments from the bank.

For bank statement processes one global process was implemented for bank and sub-ledger reconciliation, with standardization and automation of cash applications including online monitoring of bank statements.

The implementation was done using standard SAP functionality and Bank Communication Management (BCM) with SWIFT AL2 connectivity to external banks.

The project was done in a close relationship between expert consultants from infiniance and the AAK Project Team, which proved to be successful and was able to achieve its objectives.

Dansk Landbrugs Grovvareselskab, officially DLG, is a Danish co-operative company owned by Danish farmers. The main business areas are farm supplies, vitamins and minerals, service, and energy. Activities comprise trade in seed grain, grain and other crops, animal nutrition, vitamins and minerals for animal feed and fuel for agriculture. DLG’s principal markets are Denmark, Germany – through subsidiary HaGe short for Hauptgenossenschaft Nord AG – and Sweden, but export across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America also constitutes a large part of the business. The export comprises malting barley, feed grain and bread grain, rapeseed, and rapeseed oil.

The total annual export of crops reaches about DKK 5 billion. The DLG Group has 40 subsidiaries in 18 countries.

In 2019, DLG started to look for a new treasury management system (TMS), as the scalability of the current setup in Treasury had reached its limits, and the Group was seeking further growth. To this purpose, DLG engaged infiniance to assist them on a system treasury selection process. After a thorough selection process, it was decided to go with the cloud based TMS, FIS Integrity.

Following the selection, DLG also decided to engage infiniance to manage the project and execute the implementation as infiniance had gained crucial knowledge about DLG during the selection process – in close cooperation with the DLG Treasury, Finance & IT teams and the vendor, FIS.

The implementation project started in May 2020 and went successfully live in February 2021 after tireless effort by all parties involved.

Among other things the implementation scope covered the following:

• Straight-through integration to market trading platforms for foreign exchange trading
• Daily market data feeds for mark-to-market valuations and accounting
• Integration to SWIFT AL2 for bank statement integration for the DLG Group (and eventually payments)
• Integration to EBICS for bank statement integration for HAGE (and eventually payments)
• Setup of transaction processing (foreign exchange, debt/investments, interest rate swaps, facility management), internal trading, cash reporting, bank statement management, accounting and much more
• Integration for accounting and forecasting with two separate instances of SAP
• Bank statement forwarding to SAP for account reconciliation

With infiniance’s in-depth knowledge of corporate treasury in general, and DLG specifically, combined with our experience and a team of certificated consultants on FIS Integrity, we ensured a successful implementation on the agreed scope, and only with limited deviation to the original budget and planed go-live date.

Polestar is an electric performance car brand unlike any other. Polestar innovates to drive progress and create a better future, a future that is sustainable, hassle free and strikingly beautiful. Polestar share technology and engineering expertise with the Volvo Car Group yet go their own way as a guiding star. The headquarters are also neighbours with Volvo’s in Gothenburg, Sweden with vehicle production taking place in China.

When Polestar started operations in 2019 everything needed to be setup from scratch, including setting up a treasury department and implementing a cash and payments platform to support the business roll-out, before the first cars hit the streets. The choice fell on Kyriba, one of the leading cloud-based treasury and cash management solutions in the market. When the project started in December 2019, infiniance was selected as implementation partner.

The scope included cash management and forecasting, payments, and a payment factory, integrated to the ERP – Workday – for the initial markets in Sweden, Norway, and United Kingdom. The solution also included reconciliation of customer payments, sending confirmations back to internal systems.

Bank connectivity was achieved through host-to-host connections to the two primary banks for daily download and reconciliation of CAMT.053 – standard and extended – and payments based on the ISO20020 standards.

During the project, infiniance have not only assisted with a on the implementation, but also acting as a close advisor to the Polestar Treasury throughout the project.

Polestar has been live on the first parts of Kyriba for nearly six months, with project activities still ongoing as the car manufacturer extends into the new markets, and infiniance is along for the ride.