Cleared for takeoff: American Airlines ascends to new heights with total treasury transformation

What was the challenge?

“We saw an opportunity to invest in our treasury function — which manages cash, liquidity and financial risk across the organization — and improve operations with advanced technology. The treasury processes were previously manual and took up a significant amount of time, with data fragmented across multiple platforms and spreadsheets. First, we needed to give our team the right tools. Then, we introduced them to new ways of working that helped gain back those efficiencies by eliminating ad-hoc, paper and spreadsheet-based processes.”

Describe the solution delivered by the PwC community of solvers.

“To improve our cash positioning, we knew we needed a treasury management system (TMS). American’s Treasury team and PwC collaborated to go beyond that, identifying additional ways this technology could help us work more efficiently and introduce automation. The team eliminated more than 30 time-consuming manual tasks that included daily outreach to various stakeholders for expected payments and collection identification, pulsing bank fee charges by reading through over 800 pages of bank fee analyses, logging in to disparate banking portals to pull balances, manually keying in data to more than 20 spreadsheets and performing redundant reconciliation activities.

The PwC team supported us by taking a holistic approach across the entire finance organization, which helped to solve challenges beyond treasury, including fleet management. We now have a real-time, single-source-of-truth on financial impact and tracking for things like engine swaps. This is incredibly helpful with a fleet of over 1,500 aircraft. PwC also helped us set up the TMS system to handle accounting, debt administration, payments, analytics and more."

How does the solution blend the strengths of technology and people?

"Although change can be challenging, we were happy to see some of our initially hesitant team members become the strongest advocates for transformation. While technology played an important role in the solution, it was the tangible improvements to our day-to-day operations that added value. This included time savings and the ability to quickly consolidate extensive banking partner relationships, from over 100 down to 40. This, in addition to improved control and visibility, helped reduce our bank fees by about 33 percent.

We also put the largest sub-ledger of the organization into one platform, including all our debt, investments and associated accounting. This has had multiple benefits for reporting, analytics and real-time insights into our global cash and debt position.

We collaborated to automate critical tasks, eliminating paper-based processes and reducing reliance on spreadsheets. We also implemented stronger controls and provided widespread upskilling opportunities, resulting in a more empowered and motivated workforce."

Where or how did innovation and unexpected ways of thinking come into play?

“To successfully drive change, we had to think creatively about our resources. One major challenge we faced prior to implementing a TMS was the lack of streamlined financial data. PwC identified a relevant way to retrieve and format this data within the new system to facilitate daily operations and reporting. Then, the team brought critical tools, such as automation bots, to do some of the heavy lifting and capture the data and further reduce manual efforts.”