EY teams transform client financial operations with a human-centric approach

May 14, 2025

Finance leaders across industries and company sizes often struggle with fragmented data, manual processes, and compliance burdens. To address the need for greater efficiency and automation, adopting innovative solutions is no longer a matter of preference but a necessity for staying competitive. The adoption of AI by finance functions has increased significantly in the past year, with 58% of finance leaders using the technology in 2024—a rise of 21 percentage points since 2023, according to a survey by Gartner.^*

But even as AI usage is growing, there is still significant hesitation around adoption. How do we transition from old processes to new? How do we obtain buy-in from our employees? What are the true costs of transformation? To feel confident, organizations need guidance, understanding, and a solid change management strategy.

That’s where Ernst & Young LLP—also known as the EY organization—comes in.

One of the largest professional services firms in the world and a longtime Microsoft partner, the EY team’s approach to advisory services and business transformation is rooted in developing a deep understanding of clients and their needs. They shape their advisory relationships with what they call the Future Forward perspective—looking at the company not as they are in their current state but as they want to be, performing comparative analyses and developing an industry-specific strategy to bring them into the future. They work carefully with clients to create a solid foundation and act as guides before their Business Applications and other tech teams come in to implement customized solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and other applications built to improve modern work.

This unique approach has resulted in multiple Partner of the Year Awards, including 2024 awards for Intelligent Automation, Global Advisory, Security, and Dynamics 365 Finance—the latter a win for their scalable, transformational finance solutions.

Thomas Hauge, Executive Director, Technology Consulting at Ernst & Young LLP, explained, “Business transformation is about understanding the customer, the journey they want to go on, showing them what their future could look like, and then combining our technology skills and executional capabilities with the creation of established change networks to help our customers move forward.”

* Gartner® press release, “Gartner Survey Shows 58% of Finance Functions Using AI in 2024.” September 11, 2024.

Understanding customer needs to tackle the complexity of financial operations

Whether global or local, financial transformation on any scale is often perceived as complex, expensive, and disruptive––especially when it comes to updating outdated legacy systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Financial operations across industries often come with stringent compliance and regulatory requirements, and Hauge described the frustration that users can face if they’re not properly onboarded to these updated systems.

The EY organization’s framework helped Kerry Group, a global food and beverage company, deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to cut down on time-consuming, repetitive tasks. By automating key finance workflows, they achieved greater accuracy and efficiency, reducing reporting times and minimizing manual efforts. The results so far: employees have been able to eliminate about 80 minutes per use case of mundane, repetitive tasks from their work, freeing up time to focus on more important tasks.

According to Ashling Sheridan, the Data Science and Engineering Lead at Kerry Group, it was the culture around the new technology—not the tech itself—that required heavier lifting. It involved having a deeper understanding of what the adoption would accomplish—an aspect of the adoption that the EY team’s rapid foundation methodology helped achieve.

She said, “We're a fast-paced business, and I think everyone's companies have just got busier and busier all the time. We really want to improve the productivity of our team but also to ensure that they got something meaningful back from this increased use of technology.”

Combining understanding with the right technology

The EY organization’s human-centric methodology works across scale, whether organization-sized or solution-sized. A leading global media and communications organization with operations across dozens of countries reached out to the EY team because they were looking for a standardized approach to managing their tax and regulatory compliance. Finance teams in different regions were operating in silos, leading to inefficiencies and compliance risks—and globalizing the process was a herculean feat, given the massive scale of the organization’s operations.

The EY team implemented their rapid foundation methodology and tapped into their network of experts to understand local regulations and build a global compliance framework using Dynamics 365 Finance and Power Platform. The company was able to align local tax regulations with global reporting standards in dozens of different locations, accelerate reporting cycles, and reduce manual tax reconciliation efforts by 40%.

Nick Costanzo, Executive Director, Technology Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP, recalled an instance of updating their own legacy ERP system to tackle inefficiencies in their invoicing process. The EY teams used Power Platform to extend the capabilities of their preexisting ERP system. Automations increased from 20-30% to 70-80% of transactions––reaching the hundreds of thousands––which simultaneously led to reduced manual interventions and manual errors.

“We found an agile approach to help move forward in our growth journey and continue to scale,” he said.

Executing for long-term success

The EY organization’s focus on understanding and advising their clients is the driving force behind their success. They understand that CFOs don’t simply need new software—they need solutions to transform productivity while remaining compliant. Desired outcomes, ROI, and sector-specific concerns lead their understanding—and then the power of Microsoft turns that understanding into effective outcomes.

“We combine our advisory services and the strength of the Microsoft platform to move in the right direction and make life better for [our clients],” Hauge said.

As AI and other new technologies continue to evolve and impact organizations around the world, the EY teams are dedicated to continuing to grow and scale their understanding—and their outcomes.