Headquartered in London, Fremantle is one of the world’s largest content creators, producers, and distributors, operating in over 30 countries. This fact is great for fans, but not so great for Fremantle’s finance team who find it challenging to produce key, time-critical, monthly reports.
To fix the problem they partnered with Arvato and Blue Prism to launch an all-new showstopper, intelligent automation.
Challenge
Fremantle is undeniably one of the world’s largest content distribution companies. But with all that content comes the need to accurately produce various reports from producer share, hedging funds, stock adjustments, and royalties, to balance sheets and company reporting.
Fremantle had to find a way to free up their finance team so they could provide insightful analysis
To do this, Fremantle had to generate monthly reports, and these reports needed to be provided promptly at key times of each month. The sheer scale of the task was resource-intensive. For example, in any given quarter, Fremantle was generating a minimum of 2,500 royalty statements. The work was slow, with each report taking up to 20 minutes to download the data manually.
Fremantle’s finance team was spending so much time sourcing the information that they had limited time to review the data. Fremantle had to find a way to free up their finance team so they could provide insightful analysis.
Proof of concept solution
Engaging solution partner, Arvato, Fremantle conducted a series of workshops to identify the most suitable processes to complete a proof of concept. Once completed, Fremantle tasked Arvato to deploy a Blue Prism digital workforce to handle producer share reporting and hedging funds.
Hosted within Fremantle’s infrastructure, and managed by the Arvato team, the Blue Prism digital workforce now interfaces with financial services software (SAP and City Financials), pulling together data and automatically generating the reports.
Intelligent automation system
Since deployment, the time needed to complete producer share reporting has been reduced by 99%, and 82% for hedging funds analysis. Reports are accurate and consistently presented.
Seeing the benefits of intelligent automation, Fremantle has also automated royalty statements, stock adjustment reports, balance sheets, and intercompany reconciliations, reducing monthly data collation in some processes from three hours to less than one.
With the significant advantages of intelligent automation established, the team has outlined a roadmap for the continued roll-out of additional digital workers in 2021 across other areas and regions of the business.