IBM transforms quote to cash process

IBM®'s Finance and Quote to Cash organizations support more than 150,000 ERP users globally across diverse business units. Their operations ran on SAP ERP systems on a heterogenous infrastructure that included IBM Power®, IBM Z® and Intel servers. The global scale of this landscape running in on-premises environment made it complex and costly to manage. There were also opportunities to reduce manual intervention in quote to cash process, which includes Contract Registration, Billing & Invoicing, and Accounts Receivable processes.

The IBM Finance and Quote to Cash teams partnered with the IBM Chief Information Office (CIO) organization, a department within IBM that manages the applications that keep the company running, IBM Consulting® and SAP® to transform their processes end to end with a modernized approach in cloud. IBM chose to move to SAP Cloud ERP using RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server to undertake one of the world's largest corporate transformation projects ¹, aimed at fueling the company's growth and better supporting its clients.

This migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP’s next-generation Cloud ERP software, improved business processes, centralized and standardized data worldwide, and enhanced decision-making through AI and automated workflows. This enabled IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud, simplify and streamline operations, moving from an on-premise setup on IBM Power and SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud on IBM Power Virtual Server. The operational gains from this transformation also helped the IBM team deliver a better customer experience.  The solution supports more than 150,000 ERP users across 175 countries. Despite the global implementation and complexity of the program scope to support the needs of different business units, the migration was completed in 18 months. IBM realized a 30% reduction in infrastructure costs³ and related operations from the move to SAP Cloud ERP². The architecture consistency between IBM Power on premise and IBM Power Virtual Server environments resulted in reduction of migration time by up to 15-25% as compared to the heterogenous move from Power to x86 environments in other clouds due to the architecture consistency between both environments and compute performance of the Power processors¹.

"Where we’re at now is what we call the digital enterprise—streamlining work steps, radically simplifying global processes, and automating using AI at scale. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the engine of this journey," says David Ackerman, Director of SAP S/4HANA Platform at IBM. Sirish Gottimukkala, Director for IT Delivery at IBM, added: “This upgrade of SAP lays a foundation for AI and solving more complex problems. As we continue to build on this, the foundation must remain secured and resilient. This is where security and availability of SAP landscape on IBM Power Virtual Server and IBM Cloud comes into play. Since the go-live, we have been running with 100% availability, no outages.”

IBM Consulting led this transformation work end to end, providing the technical services, implementation, and application management services expertise required to help securely move and run these complex solutions. As part of the move to the SAP S/4 HANA Cloud, IBM Finance and Quote to Cash teams achieved new automated workflows that streamlined their process, including:

• Contract structuring capability, allowing for automated restructuring of contract and project terms to align with delivery requirements.
• Baseline revenue and cost transfer functionality, ensuring accurate financial alignment across projects.
• Comprehensive tracking and management of timesheet entries, streamlining the claimed hours approval and disposition process.
• Interactive dashboards for project managers, visualizing budget capacity against customer POs.
• Real-time management of invoices (creating, simulating, and releasing) and tracking of billing due dates, enhancing operational efficiency.
• An AI-powered matching algorithm analyzing payment transactions, reducing manual reconciliation efforts.

“Interactive dashboards for project managers and consultants allow better visualization to the current status of each client. These dashboards track in real-time progress in terms of due dates, and when invoices should go out—ensuring optimal alignment and synergy.” says Carol Bruce, Director of Quote to Cash Consulting at IBM.

The migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud led to remarkable improvements in the Quote to Cash process at IBM. Some of these results² include:

• 40% reduction in cycle time for contract registration process.
• 83% reduction in invoice generation cycle time for billing & invoicing.
• 72% increase in auto payment matching for the accounts receivable process.
• 30% reduction in infrastructure costs and related operations.
• 15% reduction from systems consolidation and landscape simplification across all instances.
• 10% reduction from AIOps through automation with event correlation, deduplication, and alert management.
• 5% reduction from moving to a single service team to a centrally manage landscape.

Looking ahead, IBM is evaluating future integration of tools like SAP Signavio and IBM Apptio® finance and cloud management solution to gain deeper insights into processes and drive continuous optimization.

By streamlining tasks, simplifying workflows, and leveraging AI-driven automation, IBM aims to further enhance efficiency and scalability. These initiatives and longstanding collaboration with SAP ensure that IBM remains agile and positioned to deliver even greater value to its clients, reinforcing its commitment to continuous improvement and innovation.

1. Read more about RISE to Power Virtual Server
2. IBM CIO team’s measurement of operational improvements after moving to SAP Cloud ERP
3. Read more about RISE to Power Virtual Server Press Release

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.