2021 Application Innovation Award Nomination: Exeter Finance: Automate Financial Processes

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What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need of application integrations? Describe the business and technical challenges the company was facing and how application integrations can help.

As part of the business, Exeter’s finance team discloses financial reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Treasury, and other legal entities, for audits to ensure that all vehicle loans are reviewed and approved in a fair, orderly manner. In addition, the Finance team needed a complete view of the company’s financial information in their general ledger in order to organize financial statements, and maintain the standing of the company’s financial health.

To create reports to the SEC and maintain the general ledger, however, requires the Enterprise Solutions team to help the Finance team to query all financial data that live in disparate financial databases and applications. Without a proper solution, the team would rely on a time-intensive process of using SFTP to convert files and write them back to SQLserver databases. Then they’d have to match the data amongst applications to eliminate data duplication. They needed a better way to automate data from cloud applications into finance reports, and convert XML files to XMD formatted CSV files.

Describe your application innovation strategy and how you executed the strategy. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features.

Since using SnapLogic, the team has built several simple and complex pipelines to automate financial processes. They have built several Coupa integrations to automate data into their general ledger. These pipelines are automated so that data is updated in real-time. Depending on the type of process, some pipelines are run every hour, every day while others are event-driven. For example, if the process is related to partners, like American Express or Wells Fargo, then they’d run it every day. And if the process is related to deals, each time the sales team closes a deal, the pipeline is triggered in an ad-hoc manner.

Snaps used: Coupa, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Splunk, SQLServer, Workday

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # of FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

Only Exeter’s enterprise solutions team

What were the business results after implementing these application integrations? Describe how your company, departments, and/or employees/customers benefit from the application integrations. Include any measurable metrics.

Built Coupa integrations in 4-5 days instead of 2-3 months, which helped the Finance team get the data they needed faster for audit and bookkeeping reasons.