Grant Thornton alyx™ case study in telecom

An alyx™ case study

Challenge

It’s important to keep your books balanced – and they’re not balanced if they’re months out of date. One telecom company started each year with a long list of asset purchases to reconcile from its extensive network expansion and maintenance projects. The company’s engineering, procurement and operations teams tracked project assets in a mass of separate projects. So, the accountants had to manually reconcile asset purchases across a tangle of data, which took months at the beginning of each year. External auditors determined that the months-long delay created risks in several places.

The telecom company needed to address 17 control risk areas by standardizing and accelerating the controls in its finance department.

Solution

The telecom company asked Grant Thornton to help improve its accounting policies and procedures, internal controls, processes and financial reporting – but the top priority was the company’s risk controls. During the work, the project’s key sponsors – the Controller and the CFO – took jobs with other companies. The Grant Thornton team had to build new relationships while building new solutions.

Through all of the leadership transition and disconnected data, Grant Thornton audit, tax and advisory specialists found a path to success. The team used alyx to find the right solutions, accelerate work, standardize processes, reduce risk and clear out backlogs with a comprehensive and streamlined approach that focused on automation.

Results

The Grant Thornton team addressed the risks and saved the company 3,200 hours in accounting, creating a solution that paid back the company’s investment in just over a year, with a 160% return over three years. The team also identified other potential efficiency gains and, based on this project’s success, the company planned future phases of automation.