Case Study: Ashland achieves a 98% reduction in time to close with Redwood Software’s Business Process Automation – Finance Edition

Global specialty chemical & materials automates to reduce time to close by 98%

Ashland, a global specialty chemicals and materials company serving industries from energy to pharmaceuticals with 4,500 employees and $2.3B in revenue, faced a fragmented month-end close: separate finance teams and controllers per country and an India-based Shared Services Center performing countless repetitive manual transactions. Those manual processes led to deviations from standards and limited staff time for data analysis, so Ashland set out to centralize, standardize and free finance teams from low-value tasks.

Ashland deployed Redwood Business Process Automation – Finance Edition (integrated with SAP ERP) and worked with Redwood Professional Services to automate routine, inter-system close tasks. The company automated 48 accounting processes, cut time to close by 98% (for example, 15 minutes versus 800 minutes for activities across 40 entities), and eliminated an average of 21 employee-days per process, delivering consistent, standardized closes and higher-value work for staff while expanding automation across GL and other departments.

Ashland

Anna Buchnowska

EMEA VAT Manager