Kmart Group intends to \u201ctread carefully\u201d with AI uses in corporate finance, so far using the technology to improve the way its 450-odd stores get their vendor invoices paid.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Speaking at an SAP AI summit in Melbourne, enterprise technology general manager Craig Lanigan said the retailer saw \u201copportunities to streamline and get cost out of our business\u201d with AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we are experimenting with AI in many different areas [of the business], when it comes to our finance system, it\u2019s probably one that we\u2019re going to tread carefully with,\u201d Lanigan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to set up all of our frameworks and governance before we get into that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lanigan said Kmart had \u201cdabbled\u201d in AI through vendor invoice management process improvement works.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have vendor invoice management we\u2019ve rolled out to all of our shops,\u201d Lanigan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of using an internal mailbag – not many companies have an internal mailbag anymore, but in our 450-odd shops they used to send invoices into the office to get them paid, and they used to do a fair amount of stamping and writing information on them, but that\u2019s all scanned at store now, the system recognises the details on the invoice and then it\u2019s just a coding exercise in the office.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kmart Group – which comprises both Kmart and Target – was created through a 2023 merger of the two Wesfarmers-owned retail chains.<\/p>\n
While they both remain as separate chains, the backend operations were merged to create efficiencies.<\/p>\n
From a practical perspective in the internal finance domain, Kmart and Target have come together onto a transformed SAP system – the S\/4HANA-based RISE with SAP on AWS.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe already had SAP S\/4HANA on HEC [HANA Enterprise Cloud] for our Target brand, and we had an old ECC instance for our Kmart brand that was hosted in AWS,\u201d Lanigan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that we wanted to do [in our merger] was bring our ERPs together.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe [merger] announcement included a nine month time period to implement, which at the time was probably record-breaking to do that sort of work.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had to choose something that we had a great surety of delivery with, and we felt at the time – and it proved to be true – that making the choice to go to RISE would enable us to accelerate and get it done in nine months.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group had been live on RISE for a year at the time of the presentation – add a couple of months to that now.<\/p>\n
Lanigan said that Target\u2019s previous experience of adopting S\/4HANA assisted in encouraging Kmart\u2019s finance team to make the switch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people that moved from ECC to S\/4HANA -the Kmart people – had been using ECC 6.0 for a long time. They were very comfortable with the way it worked, it was rock solid and it never let them down,\u201d Lanigan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually, the change management program required to make a change like that would be quite difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe benefit we had was that our Target people were already using S\/4HANA. Their change journey was a fantastic one, so they were super fans of SAP S\/4HANA as opposed to ECC in terms of their daily life and experience doing their job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lanigan said the shift to S\/4HANA had generally helped finance teams to do their jobs faster, improved usability and access to insights, and \u201cmade their lives a lot easier\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom a user point of view, productivity, usability and satisfaction in their jobs has really lifted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Lanigan said there were also benefits for Kmart Group IT, with upgrades now able to be made much faster.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhereas we used to bite off a 12 month exercise to do an upgrade, we\u2019re just about to do an upgrade on RISE that will be three months from start to finish, underpinned by a lot of automated testing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The fact] we can do that in three months now is a gamechanger.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo [we] can keep current with the toolset, stay under support, [and we\u2019ve] got the benefit of having AWS and SAP doing a lot of the heavy lifting. That\u2019s made the lives of our application support team a lot easier \u2026 [and resulted in a] big drop in the cost of doing \u2026 upgrades.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kmart Group intends to \u201ctread carefully\u201d with AI uses in corporate finance, so far using the technology to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-278080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}