Beam-Suntory’s Global Treasury Management Transformation: Strategic Treasury to Optimize Liquidity and Protect Growth

Beam Suntory’s Treasury transformation modernized their operations in a decentralized environment, and with the added complexity of navigating global volatility. A dispersed team challenged by manual processes with a need to leverage a system to accommodate growth, worked with Kyriba to future proof cash and liquidity management. The interconnected ERP, TMS and Payments systems ensures business continuity, visibility and confidence in liquidity optimization today while mitigating unnecessary risk or loss for years to come.

Key Challenges Before Kyriba

1. Need for timely, global visibility to cash and liquidity for expanded, optimized investment and deployment of liquidity.
2. Ability to provide on-demand information to Financial Leadership Team, including global capabilities, enterprise wide view of cash and liquidity and centralized financial risk management.
3. Payments globally not standardized, leading to higher costs, processing inefficiencies, more complexity managing banking systems and controls.
4. Bank connectivity: The time to add a new bank took many months, a limiting factor in flexible, agile bank relationship management and consolidating cash visibility.
5. Time spent by Treasury and Accounting staff on routine processes was time consuming with various manual inputs, leading to greater possibility of errors and delays in timely financial reporting.
6. Limited FX interconnectivity between core systems including FXall trading platform, Treasury Management system, Bloomberg terminal, and SAP ERP system.
7. Management of intercompany netting process housed in separate bank system (beholden to that bank) with limited direct connectivity, leading to increased costs and complexity when accounting for 30+ entities globally.

The Solution

New payment controls and real-time connectivity for a more strategic treasury.

Goals of the Project

• Transform treasury operations with automated processes and operational efficiency, without additional headcount
• Optimize intercompany netting, cash, liquidity and risk management
• Seamlessly integrate Kyriba, SAP, Bloomberg and FXall while standardizing payments globally as a means to gain further efficiencies, cost savings, flexibility and fraud protections
• Support business continuity and resilience with easier cross-training of staff
• More centralized Treasury processes
• Add rigorous financial controls

Positive Outcomes with Kyriba

• 80% productivity improvement with automated FX and MTM process with Bloomberg, FXall, and SAP all fully connected and integrated with Kyriba – 16 hours per month saved with month end accounting entries alone
• 50% increase in automation of accounting entries (short term investing, loans, hedging, cash accounting)
• 3-6x Time-to-Value Bank Connectivity: Time to add a new bank has been reduced to 1-2 months with Kyriba
• Consolidated standardized global payments platform with improved business continuity and reduction in implementation costs
• Deploying bank fee analysis module enabled greater automation and efficiency in reporting, and has assisted in reducing fees
• Eliminated bank dependency and optimized interconnectivity between systems leading to a significantly improved process