The finance team at IBM began addressing a long-standing challenge around journal entries a few years ago. At the time, the process was highly manual, repetitive, and time-consuming—requiring data collection from multiple systems and extensive checks to minimize errors, especially during peak financial periods. This placed a significant burden on analysts and required ongoing support from IBM Consulting®. Initially, the team implemented robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline portions of the workflow. Building on that foundation, the team launched the Jobotx initiative in 2024, expanding automation capabilities using IBM® watsonx Orchestrate™ and IBM Apptio™ Enterprise Business Management (EBM). These tools addressed persistent issues like inconsistent data validation, cycle time delays and scalability. By combining AI, RPA and cost-based automation prioritization, IBM began standardizing and accelerating journal processing across regions in a more intelligent and adaptable way.

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