Shak Akhtar, General Manager of Finance Automation at Redwood Software, possesses extensive experience in finance and IT. With an accounting background from IBM and roles at SAP®, BEA, and Wolters Kluwer/Tagetik, he now leads global initiatives in finance automation and Record to Report, facilitating client-led financial transformation.
Finance leaders are under increasing pressure to close faster, with fewer resources, and with greater accuracy. Manual tasks, fragmented ERPs, and inefficient processes slow down reporting and increase risk. This interactive workshop will show you how leading organizations are rethinking their close by centralizing, harmonizing, and automating their Record-to-Report processes with Redwood.
You’ll walk away with:
• Practical insights into how automation accelerates month-end and year-end closes
• Strategies for improving data accuracy and financial visibility in real time
• A clear view of how Redwood replaces legacy tools like SAP FCC, Blackline, and others and scales across diverse ERP landscapes
• Concrete examples of automation applied to reconciliations, journal entries, intercompany, and close orchestration
Customer spotlight: Danone
Hear directly from Danone, a leading global food and beverage company with 100,000 employees worldwide. Danone embarked on a Finance Transformation journey to centralize and harmonize processes, and reduce manual effort in Record-to-Report.
After evaluating alternatives, Danone selected Redwood as the most mature automation platform to:
• Establish a single global task list with real-time visibility through dashboards.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration and improved compliance with standardized policies.
• Achieve faster journal entry processing by checking items before approval.
• Reduce peak workloads during closing periods, improving work-life balance for employees.
• Lay the foundation for comprehensive end-to-end automation of complex processes like fixed asset capitalization and bank reconciliations.
• Scale across 104 entities and 1,500 users, with plans to expand to over 2,000 users globally.
This session is your chance to see how one of the world’s most advanced manufacturers is shaping the future of finance automation — and how you can apply the same principles to your own organization.
Who should attend?
If your organization relies on SAP, you know the challenges of slow closes, fragmented data, and outdated tools. This workshop will show how Redwood automates reconciliations, journal entries, and intercompany across SAP systems — helping you achieve faster, more accurate closes. Redwood also connects to non-SAP where needed, but the spotlight is on transforming SAP Finance.
Seats are limited. Secure your place now and learn how Redwood and Danone are redefining finance automation.
Lunch will be provided in this masterclass.
Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Shak.
Download The Latest Agenda