Rio Tinto has put Microsoft’s Power Platform to use in its global shared services operations, with the first use case introducing automation to its month-end close financial process.
Senior manager of digital strategy, automation & analytics within finance and accounting services Brandon Hogan told a Microsoft webinar that when he first arrived in group services, he took immediate notice of the complexity of the miner’s month-end close process.
“The thing I noticed about our month-end process was just how many spreadsheets, hand-off points, manual checks and steps were involved to getting journals created,” Hogan said.
Journals are detailed records that analyse and list a company’s financial transactions in the order they occur. They are considered a crucial first step in accounting.
Hogan said there were “hundreds” of spreadsheets involved in the completion of the month-end process, populated with data drawn from reporting out of the miner’s SAP system.
Teams then “performed calculations” within those spreadsheets, and reviews of the calculations added complexity.
Hogan saw an opportunity to simplify and modernise the process.
“I think for any shared services oranisation, there’s always pressure: to do more with less; there’s reduced effort involved in processes that we want to achieve; we need to improve accuracy and of course the overall time it takes to complete these tasks; and we have to do this while maintaining the appropriate governance and compliance,” Hogan said.
“Our vision in group services is anchored to the Rio Tinto direction of stronger, sharper, simpler. This sets the tone: disciplined operations, continuous improvement, and a digital mindset that makes work simpler and safer for our people and better for our customers.
“In practice, my team partners across the function to simplify, standardise and automate end-to-end processes, to reduce manual effort, improve the data integrity, and create capacity for high value analysis and decision support.
“This is supported by our data-driven approach to prioritising improvements and we ensure changes are governed well and deliver measurable value.”
Rio Tinto is using Microsoft’s Power Platform – home to tools like Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Microsoft Copilot Studio – to underpin the automation of parts of the month-end process.
The deployment was undertaken by the global shared services function in conjunction with IS&T, Rio Tinto’s technology function.
“[In] our first iteration, SAP data was being fed into Power BI, Power BI was being used to calculate the journals, the journals were passed back to SAP, and the reporting for our stakeholders was automated to come from that data,” Hogan said.
“This was working exceedingly well and gave us some great improvements in the process.”
Hogan said that as a result of automation introduced so far, “the effort to produce our month-end [has] declined significantly.”
“We also achieved the fastest close in history for our largest product group, which was recognised by our group CFO,” Hogan said.
Automation had also led to “happier staff” and fewer late nights for finance personnel, in addition to “a more comfortable closing period”, although Hogan said that engaging staff had required a concerted effort.
“If I look [back] at the journey we had, during that time there was quite a bit of uncertainty stemming from not knowing what the outcome was and what’s in it for me. The felt experience for some team members was that there were things being done to them rather than with them,” he said.
“We did tackle that early on, but not at the very start of it, so we started [the modernisation] and then we tried to change tack a little bit there.
He added: “In some part that was because everything was new. We were learning new things, new tools and seeing how far we could push things, and once you find out how far you could push then you can go a little bit further and deeper into some of the processes.
“But looking back now, I’d have more of those conversations in the beginning and be very transparent, even though we didn’t know where it would lead.”
In addition to using the core Power tools, Rio Tinto is also using Copilot Studio.
“We’re seeing our teams take advantage of copilot at an ever increasing rate,” Hogan said.
“We have financial professionals using Copilot embedded in Power BI.
“That’s helping them analyse and summarise data more quickly than they could ever do before and get those answers through natural language queries that previously might have taken hours to prepare if they had to deal with the spreadsheets and downloaded data.”
Hogan predicted greater use of AI agents in the future, envisioning multiple potential applications of the technology to finance processes and to the broader global shared services function.
He also said there is more opportunity for automation.
“With the teams seeing the possibilities with the Power platform, it’s sparking some great ideas in [finance and in] other areas of group services,” Hogan said.
“It’s starting to spread.”
