Starwood Hotels was looking to increase efficiency within the treasury department and related working capital areas through major automation projects between Starwood and its main bank partners.

The aim of the initiative was to implement various technological improvements to allow for straight through processing and other automation for Starwood’s treasury and accounts payable (AP), daily cash position and short-term forecasting, payroll files, fraud prevention/account auto-reconciliation and receivable payment applications through the company’s ERP.

It was hoped that this would also eliminate many manual processes and spreadsheet tracking as well as improve controls.

As Jack Spitzer, Assistant Treasurer, explains, “The company therefore decided to shift entirely to using an SAP ERP system. This required a great deal of inter-departmental collaboration across the company and across locations.”

By shifting to a single ERP system, the company is now fully covered from a disaster recovery standpoint and it allows them to work remotely.

As a result of the shift, significant gains in visibility, efficiency and control (a SOX 404 requirement) have been made.

As Spitzer says, “We have eliminated many of the manual steps and created a significant STP environment. To take the STP process a step further, we built in automated programmes to execute outbound and inbound files without human intervention. We have better controls and audit logs to track actions/approvals and have been able to refocus time to more value added tasks.”

“The treasury team at Starwood showed great leadership and imagination, and with the help and collaboration of a large cross-functional team were able to create significant efficiencies and improvements that can be leveraged into the future at various other locations.”

The STP environment has also been supported by Starwood’s two main banking partners, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and HSBC and as a result, the need to log into multiple bank products constantly (with multiple tokens and passwords) for a large share of daily activity has been eliminated or reduced.

Other achievements gained by the automation initiative can be summarised as follows:

• Seven major cash flow/working capital areas with heavy inefficiencies were streamlined by implementing automated STP.

• Processes were shifted from paper/manual intensive steps to automated workflow, which also meant that disaster recovery could be provided through SAP in case of the need to work remotely.

• Audit trail and audit logs in SAP track all activities and confirmations, which means that there is no need for paper tracking/filing. This also satisfies Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

This initiative is an excellent example of collaboration between treasury, IT, general ledger, payables, payroll and receivables teams.

As Spitzer concludes, “The treasury team at Starwood showed great leadership and imagination, and with the help and collaboration of a large cross-functional team were able to create significant efficiencies and improvements that can be leveraged into the future at various other locations.”