Sony’s Global Treasury Transformation

More sophisticated treasury operations

Now, Sony’s Treasury team is looking back with satisfaction on the project.

Mr. Yagi explains: “Now, we have visibility into global treasury activities from all regions, which is a real improvement. The treasury management system, METRO, was implemented as our global treasury platform with sophisticated technologies, greatly improved from the previous legacy in-house TMS systems. Our project members gained huge insights and experiences during the project, by working closely together with the Zanders team, all the partner banks, our IT teams and all the treasury members. That proved to be significant contributions to the development of human resources who can globally promote DX projects in the finance and treasury fields, which will continue to be needed in the future.”

Mr. Ishiguro agrees: “It is very important for both finance/treasury members and IT members to collaborate closely. It is also very important to promote young and mid-career employees actively, to provide opportunities for good trainings and for good ‘learning’ by direct and active participation to the project tasks.”

Mr. Miura adds: “One of the benefits of implementing METRO is that we can operate straight-through-processing (STP) in the FX trading process. Previously a lot of manual inputs needed to execute an FX trade with a bank, here and there, for the same deal. Now FX dealers can execute FX deals with banks who quoted best price effectively in a fully automated manner. We experience the improvements every day.”

Mr. Yagi agrees: “Our new SAP S/4HANA Treasury is much more advanced than our previous legacy treasury systems. SAP is much faster, more transparent and designed more effectively and efficiently, fully automated in various operations. Our previous application did not have any payment functionalities, so we had to enter payments separately manually into a separate E-banking system. SAP makes payment runs automatically, with timely status update of payment files. We have fewer issues or errors in METRO, all operations are run in a transparent manner, which prevents from fraud and other risks. The treasury system makes it possible to disclose financial information quickly to Sony management, the external auditor or investors if necessary.”

Mr. Ishiguro: “I strongly feel that we have been enjoying benefits of standardized treasury operations across regional treasury centers after the implementation of SAP Treasury. All three main treasury centers – in Japan, USA and UK – have been using the same treasury platform, and achieved a very good and stable operation, from various perspectives.”

A unique project

Apart from the pandemic restrictions, several elements made this project unique.

Firstly, the METRO Project was the first global IT system implementation project involving all business segments (except the Financial Services segment) of Sony Group. The project was unique because both Wave 1 and Wave 2 went live in a Big-Bang go-live approach around the world.

Secondly, it is unique because it was a ‘GLOBAL’ treasury transformation project with project members from eight countries. Treasury teams were in Tokyo, Singapore, Malaysia, UK, Poland and USA, and IT teams were in Bangalore, India, and the Zanders team was mainly in the Netherlands. As a result, the members of various nationalities have established a truly global project structure in which each project member was in charge of each task across the countries.

Ms Laura Koekkoek, partner at Zanders: “That global approach of this project, in which all regions and their personnel were combined, was really unique. And the whole collaboration between the different regions was really successful.”

Zanders partner, Ms Judith van Paassen adds: “The old systems already had the ambition of best practices processes in them but contained a technology risk. Now that there is a system to fully centralize, standardize and automate all processes is a big achievement.”

Mr. Ishiguro: “Whenever we discuss with Zanders, I remember we had very useful information available on key items, sometimes to deliver to the Sony senior management, or sometimes to resolve critical issues with a reasonable and solid solution, so we were able to proceed with the project with deep insights from SAP treasury experts.”