Case Study: Royal DSM achieves a 3-day month-end close with Redwood Software's RoboFinance

Royal DSM Robotises Financial Shared Services

Royal DSM, a Dutch global life and materials sciences company, tasked its Financial Shared Services (FSS) with improving slow, error-prone month‑end close processes that took 15 days and involved about 485,000 manual tasks across 44 processes and 190 company codes. Benchmarking showed several finance functions lagged peers, so DSM set out to drive FSS into the top quartile through automation.

Using RoboFinance® by Redwood Software, DSM deployed over 60 software “robots” in a phased rollout, automating 89% of those tasks across nine business groups. The program cut the financial close from 15 to 3 days, freed 45 FTEs from transaction work, improved accuracy and compliance, and delivered a positive ROI within nine months.

DSM

Theo de Haas

Senior Business Partner Group Services, FSS