Blue Ocean Strategic Partners provided 75% overall time savings by streamlining and upgrading the accounting systems, allowing Oglebay to improve organizational efficiency and significantly improve financial accuracy.
Using intelligent automation, we evolved a completely manual finance and accounting function and put it on a path towards automating many cumbersome processes, minimizing the opportunity for human error and improving internal and external customer service with timely, accurate information.
Enabling excellence at Oglebay
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners is an intelligent automation provider, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that streamlines and upgrades processes so they're efficient and organized. Our goal, "automate to elevate", is to remove unnecessary steps and eliminate wasted time. One critical monthly process is the time it takes to publish the financial statements.
We developed a precise series of steps so the month-end process is accomplished on the first business day of the new month, with fewer processing errors, less effort in report generation and no tedious tasks.
Our client, Oglebay, has 250 lodge rooms and 54 vacation cottages, including two estate houses and three 8-bedroom premium cottages, with more than 90 years of service. Oglebay is a 2,000-acre public park in Wheeling, West Virginia, and has seen millions of visitors over the years. Park operations are led by President and CEO Robert Peckenpaugh, who is constantly striving to enable the team to do better.
At Oglebay, month-end finance and accounting tasks were never caught up. With our help, everything is now accomplished within the month. The team also manually extracted check and cash POS reports for reconciliation every day, all time-consuming tasks. Highlights of the automation journey:
- Accounts payable was transformed into an automatic processing system for payable invoices, with approval by authorized leaders
- Daily production of cash and check POS reports for reconciliation with bag counts was automated
- Daily journal entries are now posted automatically, with hands-free reporting to executives
- Doubleknot credit card reconciliation was automated: sales and fees data are downloaded from Doubleknot and account summaries from the bank, creating a comparison worksheet that flags variances for reconciliation
- Purchase orders can now be created easily by non-ERP users
- Daily and monthly reports are generated automatically, while reports from different systems are archived for data extraction and reconciliation
- Monthly reconciliation sheets for credit card payments processed through Shift4 are created and updated automatically every day
The bots are built with Python and Robocorp: a malleable and secure way to perform repetitive, mundane tasks with a very high level of accuracy.
Results
Our approach included meeting with Oglebay's CEO, VP of Operations and Director of Finance to identify the specific problems, document current processes and build the bots. These progressive leaders supported their team to change and innovate during a year-long reorganization. Without their openness to looking at how work could be done differently, the project would not have been a success.
By reorganizing the accounting function, the 20-day process to produce financial statements was reduced to less than 8 days. To achieve this, some accounting processes were streamlined while others were automated. Bharath Bangalore, founder of Blue Ocean Strategic Partners, served as Oglebay's CFO adviser, assisting the team with strategic analysis.
"Working with Bharath Bangalore and the Blue Ocean team was game changing for the Wheeling Park Commission. Automation fundamentally changed our accounting processes and tools were created to allow consistent available reporting for quick decision making. While this work was happening, Bharath provided forward thinking and dynamic feedback on business processes and structures. This team is amazing."
— Bob Peckenpaugh, CEO and President, Wheeling Park Commission, operator of Oglebay Resorts
"We at Blue Ocean are proud of our clients for being self-directed innovators first and foremost, as much as we seek to help them deliver on this vision by enabling access to automation and the concept of digital workers. Bob Peckenpaugh and his team are a perfect example of this complement in action. As a former finance executive, I know the pain of feeling behind on a never-ending pile of manual tasks. With this bottleneck alleviated, Oglebay's team is now working smarter, not harder, in order to focus on even better serving millions more visitors for years to come."
— Bharath Bangalore, Founder, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners