Siemens Treasury goes beyond simply solving current problems or optimizing existing processes or tools; it is dedicated to advancing treasury operations to the next level while creating opportunities to support Siemens’ industrial business.
Recognizing incremental improvements wouldn’t be enough to future-proof its treasury, the team needed to challenge conventional methods and innovate new, automated technologies to meet the demands of its dynamic global business into the future. “The future of the Siemens business model will get away from manual business cases,” says Rathgeb. “We will move to a culture that creates these platforms—that will be the future of the treasury business.”
This transition marked a cultural evolution, emphasizing the importance of experimentation and learning. “You can’t be creative if you’re fearful you’ll make a mistake. When it comes to new technologies and new ways of doing things, embracing failure culture is essential,” notes Nicola Bates, President and CEO of Siemens Capital Company.
Siemens Treasury faced a number of opportunities in its existing infrastructure:
- Reducing complexities and improving time to market: Traditional pooling structures can take months to set up and often require intricate configurations and administrative efforts, far too long and cumbersome for a future-forward treasury like Siemens Treasury.
- From local cash pooling to global working capital optimization: Managing a complex network of thousands of decentralized bank accounts across multiple time zones works with today’s standards but did not provide the real-time visibility and flexibility required for global liquidity optimization. “At a big company like Siemens, money isn’t always where it needs to be. Having over 2,000 bank accounts is a huge, manual task that our people were responsible for,” explains Rathgeb.
- Manual workflows weren’t acceptable to support a 24×7 business: Even with standardized processes, Siemens Treasury understood that automating cash allocation and payment workflows support always-on cash management and enable data-driven, automated decision-making.
- Pushing past paper-based collections: Reliance on manual, paper-based collections delayed applications, are highly expensive and increased Siemens Treasury’s exposure to fraud risk. Additionally, there’s simply no room for paper payments in the organization’s philosophy of simplification, automation and making treasury leaner.
Siemens Treasury saw these challenges as opportunities to transform its operations and create a more efficient, forward-looking treasury. By questioning the status quo of complex and manual treasury management, the team prioritized simplifying processes as a foundational step to enable automation wherever possible.
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