Heather 0:01
Hello, everybody and welcome to our virtual radiants on the road program. I’m so happy to welcome you here today. My name is Heather King. I’m the VP of events and community programs for Highradius. It is my true honor and pleasure to have you join us today and our virtual radiants on the road program. We have a great day in store for you and we really appreciate you taking some time to join us today. Whether it’s for this one session or for it or if it’s for all five sessions that we have planned for you. Alright, so before we start our fabulous first keynote session, there are a few little housekeeping notes that I’m going to tell you if you’re going to join us for multiple sessions. You are going to hear these housekeeping notes a few times, so bear with me. So first polls, you are going to see polls, you know, throughout the entirety of this program, pretty much every session has some sort of poll going on. Polls are super fun, they’re easy to answer. So when we have a poll that we prompt you to answer, you’re going to see some buttons popping up on your screen. Just click on one of those buttons, the answer that you want to give, and then we will let you know what the results of that poll are for our Q & A. So I don’t know if you’ve noticed in the upper right-hand corner, you have some chat boxes there. Our speakers, every single one who you’re going to be hearing from today wants to answer your questions. But since you’re there and we’re here, the only way to do that is by typing them into our chat boxes. So if you are a little bit shy, please use the box labeled q&a Because those are going to be anonymous. You can type those in there and nobody will know who was asking that question. But if you’re not shy and you want everybody to know what you’re asking, please do use the room chat. The room chat is where you can ask us any questions where you can talk to each other. You can ask questions of each other during the session. We would love love, love to hear from you in that room chat. So actually, I’m going to ask you a question now that I’d love everyone to put in the room chat if you’re willing. I’m just very curious to know where everybody is hailing from today? Let us know where you are joining us from. I’m joining everyone from Long Island, New York. Where it is a lovely 50 something degrees, not cold winter like yet at all. So we’re enjoying that weather. Alright, so moving on. Oh, I love it. Houston, Atlanta, pleasant prairie Wisconsin. I want to learn more about you, Mark. Um, alright. So also I have some exciting things to note. So virtual events one of the fun things that we get to do is we get to give prizes. So giving prizes is something that we love doing and we have a bunch of them for you during this day today. So a few ones just to know stay through to the end of the session because at the very end of every single session, we will be doing a trivia question and you have to type into this room chat the answer and the first person to get the answer correct will receive a $20 gift card which means after every session, you have a chance to win. So there are 100 bucks up for grabs. One question every session $20 A question stays to the end here the question and you get a chance to win. Also, the more sessions you attend, the more chances you have to enter our raffle to win an echo show. I never heard of what an echo show was before but it is super, super awesome. And I would love to get one if I could win it but I can’t you can though. Every time you watch a session you are entered to win. So you’ve just gotten your first raffle ticket right now. Every time you get another session, you get another raffle ticket. We will announce that at the end of the event. Also, of course, we are thrilled to have you here. We have Highradius and we would love to actually meet with you and get a chance to interact one on one virtually Of course. So if you are interested in having a meeting with us, a 30-minute virtual meeting with one of the high radians. We would love to make that happen. Everyone who books a 30-minute meeting with us and has that meeting will be entered to win an iPad. Just let us know and you can let us know in the q&a box if you’re interested in having that meeting with us. And we will definitely get back to you. Alright, so I think that those are all the notes to start the program. I’m already out of breath and I’m ready to pass over the stage to our keynote. So our first session of the day is advice to finance executives looking to excel in the new economy. And our speaker is Scott Phillips, the head of global finance shared services at Intuitive Surgical. He has more than 25 years of experience in financial shared services operational and compliance management. He has had a very impressive career journey which I’m sure I can go into many many details about, but I won’t because you want to hear from Scott You do not want to hear from me. Alright, so it is time for me to say goodbye don’t forget to save at the end. Don’t forget to enter those polls and don’t forget to put all of your questions on either the room chat or in our q&a box. Alright, Scott, I am giving you the virtual stage.
Scott Phillips 4:47
All right. Thank you very much, Heather. Hi, everyone. My name is Scott Phillips. I am based in Atlanta, Georgia. And I’m definitely staying to the end of the presentation because I want one of those prizes, as I’m sure you do. So hopefully we can keep you entertained enough and engaged enough here to stay here and get one of those places. I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my experiences and thoughts with you today. So first, I want to provide an introduction and a little bit of an overview of my career experiences. An Overview of Intuitive Surgical tourism. There may be some people who haven’t heard of Intuitive Surgical, and a review of our financial or shared services organization. So that’ll kind of give you some context of where my viewpoints are coming from that I want to share with you today. That’s it. Well, let’s just jump right in here to the slide. That’s a little bit about me and my career. So I joined Intuitive Surgical in July of 2020, where I currently lead the global financial services organization. Prior to that, I spent approximately eight and a half years in the steel industry with two foreign-owned companies, one in Germany, one in Germany, and one in the UK. And my longest tenure was with Kloeckner metals. Which is also where I first implemented high radius and had a great experience there. And then both of these organizations had multibillion-dollar footprints in the Americas so I had the opportunity to lead the finance organizations to establish the shared services and for both of them in an internal audit function as well. Before that, I was in the retail industry. Majority of my time there was spent at Walmart where I led the US internal audit team and also was able to provide some support for the show choices function there at Walmart. And then I started my career with CitiGroup in the financial services industry. And now bringing all that experience here is intuitive to build a global shared services organization, which is what I’m going to talk to you about next.
Scott 6:47
Before we dive into that though, I’m gonna turn off my camera just to make sure we have the bandwidth there. And we’ll focus on the content here. So a little bit about Intuitive Surgical and to give you an overview of the company. So for those of you that aren’t familiar with our organization, Intuitive Surgical is a pioneer in the robotic-assisted surgery industry and the focus is on providing minimally invasive care and, and really a focus on the patient first is what we always talk about intuitive and that kind of incorporates or is integrated into everything that we do at the organization. So our key system that we have which is the robot that performs the surgery is called the Vinci Surgical System. And a few of them, if I can give you a little bit of an overview of the company that kind of helps you understand a little bit more I have a couple of analogies that were shared with me when I joined the organization. So when we have these robots in the workplace, through hospitals throughout the US and throughout the world, we’ll touch on some of the metrics there in a minute. But if you think of the cell phone industry, right, you have Apple iPhones and you have tons of engineers that are sitting there working on the next version of the iPhone and probably three or four versions down the road. So that’s kind of similar to Intuitive and we have a group of engineers and they’re working with the robots and figuring out ways to improve them. So they’re already working on the next version, the version after that version after that. So similar to the cell phone industry, when a new version of the robots is released all the hospitals want the new robot right just like a cell phone, so that’s usually a very exciting time for the organization. So you have a lot of the hospitals that will trade in the old robots, and then we can take those and place them in universities to start training the next generation and surgeons on robotic surgeries and things like that. So that’s kind of one analogy that we use. And then if you think of the other analogy that we have is the razor blade. So if you think of the robot as the razor and all the little instruments and accessories that actually go in and perform the specific procedures as the razor blades, blades can only be used some one time some, you know, maybe up to 10 times or so, but then you have to replace the razor blades, right, just like on a resume. So that’s kind of the same thing. We’re going to robot use them for how many times they’re prescribed for and then you have to replace the ratios on it. And then kind of the other piece of that I don’t have an analogy for but is the service. So our robots have to be servers so we have a team of service engineers based throughout the world that is constantly going in and servicing the robots because we don’t have the luxury of having a robot not work. So it’s not like a car where if it breaks down on the side of the road, the whole mechanic our robot has to work for the entire trip but so so that’s very important. So those are really our three revenue streams. That was our system sales, and then our instruments and accessories, and then our service contracts on the robot which are not optional for us. So hopefully that helps you to understand the company a little bit more, and we are headquartered in Silicon Valley. As I mentioned, I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia. So we do have East Coast and West Coast campuses. So our national training center for our surgeons is based here in Atlanta. So if you look at the map of the US, you’ll see a majority of hospitals actually more towards the east coast. So that’s where most of our customers are, you know, Atlanta has. I like to say good airports and people wouldn’t get it for at least a big airport. It’s easy to get in and out of right. So it’s easier for all the surgeons to come into Atlanta to train on our systems and then go back to their hospitals or their surgery centers where they perform procedures. We actually have an update to this 8.5 million number here. So we just this week announced that we exceeded 10 million procedures worldwide on the Da Vinci robot systems. That was a very exciting milestone for the company and we’re looking forward to the next 2 million procedures that we’re able to help people with. And then I think I mentioned this earlier, but there are 67 countries where there’s a Da Vinci system, and we’re looking to expand that as we go into 2022. And then we have approximately 7000 plus employees globally. That’s all a review of the company. And then we’ll move into talking about an overview of our shared services function.
Scott 11:13
So as I mentioned, I started with the organization in July of 2020. And my role was actually new for Intuitive so that means that the shared services model for finance was new for the organization as well. So the last 18 months have really entailed a lot of methodical planning, both short-term and long-term. And in designing what we’re going to start implementing in 2022, to establish a global shared services function for the organization that’s going to be able to support us in the future as we continue to grow. So we’ve been doing all this when I’m starting with the organization in the middle of the pandemic. So I still have today to fall. I think about two-thirds of my team actually haven’t got to meet face to face. So I’m looking forward to getting to do that eventually. And then our company has still been on the growth path. So we’ve still been adding employees even in our shared services and while we’ve been doing with a shared services function, here again, mentioned I started with the company in July of 2020. So my role I was new to the organization in the middle of the pandemic and the Shared Services function since my role as a shared services function was new to the organization as well. So we’ve been going through our planning process in determining the best organization structure and the model that we want to implement for the Shared Services function that we believe is best going to support the company. So keeping that in mind when we go through some of the experiences. I’ve started with the company model of pandemics and still haven’t met probably two-thirds of my team face to face yet. And we’ve been growing rapidly adding team members not only to the rest of the company but also Insurance Services and not waiting for the long-term plan but also working on some key transformational projects. So one of them that work that we’re working on now is implementing Highradius at Intuitive so we’re very excited about that. And we’ll talk a bit more about that later. And then we also were implementing partnering with our that’s going to transform our AP process on our indirect inside so a lot of things going on, you know in the company as we’re building out a team, building out the org structure at a company that is growing at a rapid rate in making infrastructure changes. So currently our geographical footprint for shared services is what we had in place when I arrived. So we have a team in the US in Mexicali, Mexico, and in our European headquarters in Oban, Switzerland, which is not typically your user of a shared services feature, main base, but I’ll speak to a little bit about so in the US, or excuse me in our service catalog for both North America and Europe. We have in scope, the accounts receivable function or overseeing process, the AP process, our payroll team, and then our TD which is also connected to our AP team tightly. And then in Europe. We also support VAG and HCP compliance which is Healthcare Provider Compliance, which is a key compliance activity in our industry that we’re in, and then we also have one team member in Europe that is based in Germany who helps support us there. From my treasury standpoint, in the US, we have a corporate treasury team that’s separate from the Shared Services function currently. We do partner with them closely, especially on our banking relationships. And then in Europe. We are Team their managers a little bit more of the process, and they’re supported by our corporate treasury team but they have some hands-on responsibilities with our banking relationships, our card programs, and other things that we have. Alright, so let’s get to that gives you some context of me and the company in our shared services organization. So what are some of our visions and goals for shared services going to be to standardize our shared services processes, focusing on sustainability and scalability? So we want to leverage our, our center that we have in Mexicali, which is a key, really out of our low cost operating center where you want to standardize 75 to 80% of our processes and then use our regional centers our original team members to make up the last 20 to 25% of that process, but we need we have statutory or local requirements or business needs. Now and then also, technology is going to be a key piece of the strategy that we implement. So we’d like to have as much of our processes automated as possible. And then our long term expansion into Asia, which is still a growing business for us and the volume is picking up there. And as it gets to the point where we want to absorb those activities in the shared services. We’ll have the structure and technology in place to do that. Alright, and that brings us to our first poll question, Heather.
Heather 16:18
Our poll question. All right, everyone, you’re gonna see some buttons pop up on your screen. Has the pandemic accelerated your digital transformation initiatives within finance? Yes. No, or there was no impact. So just click your mouse on one of those buttons. And we’re going to give you about 30 seconds for that because we want to start moving right along and we will let you know the response in 30 seconds. Make sure you click on that button. Let us know if there’s been an impact on your digital transformation initiatives in finance. I would hum the Jeopardy theme, but I don’t think anyone needs to hear that for me. However, if you tell me in the chat box that you really want me to have the Jeopardy theme. I might be persuaded later on in the event. Alrighty, here we go. So 83% of you said a 0% of you said B and 17% of you said C wasn’t impactful 83% said yes. 17%. Let’s see. I don’t think there’s anything too surprising here. Right, Scott? So I’ll let you take it over from here. Thanks, everybody.
Scott 17:31
Yeah, not surprising. Most of my colleagues that I’ve been talking with over the last or during this period of the pandemic. Yes, there’s been no exam answer. There’s been at least some type of tea or some thought. Now you want to focus on your digital transformations within finance. So some of the things that at least in my experience, that were that we felt were impacted were one the visibility to our team and our information became a priority. So one of the things we realized that we’ll talk about is that the customer experiences our employee engagement, team collaboration, and strategizing for our back office, which has just recently become one of the priorities. So all of those things were things that we noted you wanted to focus on. We also identified some challenges with talent management that we’ll talk a little bit about. And then, of course, the question that we just default question that we just had was about automation and digital transformation. And we’ll speak about some of the things that we’re going to focus on there with him within our shared services plan.
Scott 18:48
Moving right along there are some of the initial at least recent impacts. This is kind of the current update and current situation. So for North America, of course, we have the new variant, which doesn’t seem to be as impactful as the Delta variant was but still has some impact but we’re still moving forward with our plan to move back to at least implement our new wild stands for ways of working that. I’ve heard a couple of my colleagues use the same acronym. So hopefully some of you heard that much new. So we have our Future Ways of Working or future while program to put in place and we’re planning to do that in February. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. And then in parts of Europe, unfortunately for our team, you know, we have the variant that seems to have impacted a little bit more so basically, our team has went back to fully remote work there. They were getting back to the office, and they’re about to move. And then another one of the challenges that we had in early 21 with the pandemic impacting the Indian subcontinent, we have our IT team supported heavily there with some of our team members in India. So that impacted some of the projects that we’re working on and how to revise some timelines and things like that. So we’ve kind of felt an impact all over the world from a short service in finance standpoint. So the key three things we want to focus on in our next 1010 or 12 minutes here is one of what are some of the focus areas that we mentioned on the first slide and going to go into a bit more detail of those and some of the opportunities and then how they impact our talent management and with our recruiting in with our current team and being able to retain and attract talent. And then and then what are some of our thoughts or our plans on how it’s going to impact automated automation of some of our processes going forward. So first of all, focus on the impacts COVID So moving on to the next slide. So one of our first key focus areas was increasing the bill visibility into our operations. So this was more you know, in shared services, you have some of your team members who are focused on some very specific transactional activity. And again, not having a shared services model already in place in the pandemic. You know, we saw the impact of that so we didn’t have that real-time visibility into the day-to-day activities. We can see it on the back end from the results, but do you want to see in real-time how the teams progressing and are they facing challenges? Are they being able to complete their work? Luckily, on the back end, we had very good results, but it would have given us more comfort how we could if we could have seen that going through the process. So one of the things that we implemented is actually for all of finance. We’ve implemented an analytics team, and they have specific support for our shared services functions. So they’re helping us with developing some real-time reports leveraging and updating our enterprise data warehouse in leveraging Tableau to build some of those reporting, where are the applications that we currently have in place to not support that to the level that we needed? So that’s, you know, getting us ready and we’ve had a lot of development in that area. And even during this last impact when our Europe team now had to go back to remote work. We’ve been able to leverage that and have some visibility into the day-to-day activities. And processing activities for sure church functions. So that’s been very beneficial, and we’re glad that we keyed in on that. The next area that we’ll focus on is talking about our collaboration with our customers. So specifically if we think about accounts receivables, our AR, our collections team, contacted our customers, AP teams, to talk through issues and to get invoices processed and paid. You know that we want to make sure that we’re staying close to our customers and we found that you know a lot of that was happening. Because both of those teams were based in the office and then when they both went remote, those people started developing new routines with their personal lives and their work lives. So those communication points began to decrease in this kind of ties into the first one to have visibility over those connection points, and however be and then one of the other areas that we focused on our employee engagement was impacted. So we turned that around and focused on team building our flexible working models and making sure that we’re doing more frequent rewards and working with our global rewards team to make sure that people feel that they’re engaged, that they’re valued, and that their work is being recognized. So that was an important part for us to focus on.
Scott 23:38
And then one of the other things that we want to do is enable better team inter-team collaboration. So you missed out on that remote work you missed out on you know, the hallway conversations and the idea generation that happens there. So, you know, we’ve created some intentional things with touchpoints and working sessions, unfortunately, a lot of men online, but it did start to see some of that comeback and more or less idea generation and that collaboration take place. So that’s one of the benefits that we’re looking forward to getting back in the office that’ll fully resolve it. But, you know, in the interim, some of the things that we put in place in terms of notes and pads for members and some automated escalations to managers and higher levels that helped with that, that collaboration and notification. Then the last one, there is our back office strategy. So we started thinking, actually probably about six or so months ago, about what this is going to look like, not just the shared services, but for all of five minutes and 10, our teams continue to work from home because we felt that we had pretty good activity. So do they really need to be on-site four times in which teams need to be in offices more than others? And then, you know, if you’re going to go back to the office should the company be focused on time, the intentional reasons for going into the office. So those are some of the things that we thought through. Next, we’ll talk a little bit about talent management and get to the next two topics, so we have some time for a Q & A. So we’ll turn it back over to Heather for the next poll question here.
Heather 25:17
flexible work hours and work location as a part of your recruiting efforts. Yes, no, or we’re thinking about it. You get 30 more seconds for this one, everybody. A B, C, or D click on that bubble. I made a promise. I’m not going to be on video for it though. I didn’t promise that.
Heather 25:49
Yeah, okay. Oh, and I got the results. Right. Where did you end up there? Perfect. Okay, are you offering flexible work hours and work location as a part of your recruiting efforts? 82% of you said yes. 18% of you said no, nobody’s thinking of it. It’s only yes. No answers. 82% said yes. Also not too surprising for me at least. So, Scott, you let us know. And let’s say keep at it.
Scott 26:16
Great. So I think that’s been pretty consistent with what I’ve heard in mind as well. And I didn’t do that. We have a very large and very good internal recruiting team. And that’s been one of the things in their research that they’ve determined as that you’re to get the top talent and retain talent or a lot of people said no, but for us, we really feel that to have that flexible working environment is going to be key to getting the talent and retaining the talent that we’d like to be able to have as part of our team. For us, just in the recruiting space, it’s taken almost during the pandemic, we’ve seen it take more than twice the amount of time it did pre-pandemic, to recruit somebody and get them on board. So one of the reasons our internal team thinks that that is happening is because people got the option to work from home and haven’t been out looking for jobs. So the candidate pool has decreased. And now that people are starting to get back into it and look for jobs, that’s always a question that comes up is, you know, what’s the what’s the work schedule going to be like? So we’re proactively addressing that and we’ve got a slide in here where we focus on the ways of working policy that we’re going to implement at Intuitive. First, I’m going to talk about the focus on digital evolution, and how our put our plans there. So one of the things that we noticed that intuitive as we’re assessing our shared services organization implementing a new plan is that we had a lot of RPA. But this RPA was, you know, some of the reasons that it works good and it doesn’t cost a lot to implement. We have a team-based at Intuitive that helps people with that helps the different departments focus on that. It’s less disruptive.
Heather 28:22
Hey everyone, it seems that Scott has frozen again, we will have to work with God on his zoom or Wi-Fi bandwidth, while we wait and try to get him back into the session. Tell me a little bit about yourself, for anyone who is willing to share some information. So you’ve already told us where you’re hailing from. Why don’t you tell us now what company are you with? We’d love to learn a little bit more about who’s joining us today. Oh, just got a note that says he’s back. saving, saving everybody that the pain of having to admit where you’re from. Alright, we’ll give Scott a second to get back on video. But please feel free to give us a little bit more information about yourself or ask each other questions. I haven’t seen any questions come through yet. Of course, if you want to ask about anything, put it into our chatbox here or into the little question mark? q&a box as we wait for us to be able to jump back onto video.
Heather 0:17
All right, welcome back now,
we can see or I can see you and hear you. So I guess I like to start wrapping up pretty soon.
Scott 0:25
Oh, I’m at the end here. So apologies for the technical difficulty. Some of the things that we wanted to focus on in AI but in refocusing on that and kind of moving away from RPA, where were some of the key capabilities so we wanted our computer systems to handle a lot of the routine transactions that we feel like could be automated, and then have our people or the human element, start thinking of things that required decision making and as part of that, determining if some of those decisions could be automated in the future, leveraging AI capabilities. So, for example, some of the things that we keyed on that we want to focus leverage AI for are some of our blocked order predictions. So if we have accounts that are coming up and getting close to being put on hold, that we’re able to notify the notifier ourselves way in advance and notify us and the customer that those are happening, and then some of our collections and make predictions that will help us forecast our cash flow a little bit better than we do currently. And then some of our nonstandard remittance capture. So that’s been something that’s been a pain point for intuitive in the past and we’re looking forward to higher ed is helping us with that as we’re able to automate not only the typical trade AR payments that come in, but also leverage the tool for some of the nontrade AR to help out our accounting teams and, and be able to automatically post some of those transactions as well. And then using the tools or AI to focus on forecasting some of our more complex cash flow categories, as we one of the Intuitive things that are happening with our grocery as the company becomes is becoming more and more complex as we find different ways to finance our systems for our customers and receive those payments. And also as we continue to expand globally throughout the world. Our Cash Forecasting is becoming more complex. So those are some of the key areas that we want to focus on. So then just to summarize and get us to the q&a, so the areas that we focused on, were around the COVID and the areas that some of the priorities and how we worked through those and some of the things that we’ve put in place to deal with that focus on our talent management and our ways of working policy. So we have part of our staff divided into three categories. So fully remote, hybrid, or full-time in the office is more on our manufacturing lines, people that have to be there to make the manufacturing lines work. Our fully flex or fully remote team is more of our sales team that we’re already based out there are some of the field engineers that service our systems that I talked about earlier. And then the finance team is going to go with the hybrid option. So for us, that’s going to be three days in the office and two days at home initially, but we’re going to be flexible with that as we move into it because we realize people have great new personal routines, we work routines. So it’s going to be a transition back to even though it’s going to be a hybrid strategy is going to be a change that people have to adapt to and figure out how to how to work on not only through with their professional wives but also to their personal lives, especially if we have kids involved or other family members that you care for etc. And the last thing we focused on was AI, of course, and how we want to be able to leverage that as we’re building out a global shared services function. So Thanks for Thanks for listening out. We have any questions, Heather, I think now we’ll be moving into the q&a session.
Heather 4:00
Scott, I, let’s see. I’m just gonna do a quick chat check of everything. All right, one quick question and very quick because we have to move on to the trivia question and the next one is can you tell our audience if there’s a solution or capability that you’re most excited about deploying at Intuitive in the future, or really just really happy within the present?
Scott 4:24
So so we’re very excited to implement the cash applications high radius module here at the end of q1 we have targeted so we just finished our simulation and the simulation showed that we more than doubled our auto-post rate for cash applications that included the US and Europe so we are super excited about moving forward about getting through our testing and rolling that out before the end of Q1.
