Heather King
Oh, hello, there we are. Hi, Alright everybody, we are going to get started. Catch up in a minute or two. We are going to be starting our next session. Before we do that reminder, we’re going to have a poll on this one. So make sure you get on that Whova app when you are directed. You’ve all been such a great audience answering those polls, so keep at it. Also, just remember that you guys have been also great with questions. So please don’t stop answering those questions when prompted. And please make sure to rate all of those sessions after we are done. So we know what you think of everything that we’re putting up here for you. Alright, so I will our speakers are jumping on for managing cash. Well, you should still invest in that finance transformation projects. I’m not going to read any bios, we have Sean Ryan, principal for EY Jennifer Jones, VP of invoice to cash enterprise service line at Genpact, and Essam Elmadhoun who will be moderating this discussion director of global alliances at HighRadius. So I’m just gonna let them take over.
Essam Elmadhoun
Awesome. Thank you. So we’ve talked a lot about today about, you know, our solutions, and for this session with Sean and Jennifer, we want to talk about digital transformation projects. So, you know, more and more leaders started working on automation digital transformation initiatives, during COVID to free up cash and working capital. And as we move forward, hopefully, post COVID. And there’s no imminent threat for cash, Does it still make sense to invest in these digital transformation projects? And, Jennifer, I want to start with you. What are your thoughts on kind of digital transformation initiatives kind of post COVID?
Jennifer Jones
So first of all, we really want to thank Dee and Tim, for having such a fabulous session. And for us going after them. So we have to have our comedic value needs to come into play somehow,
Shawn Ryan
we’re just going to reference them all the way through them. Yeah,
Jennifer Jones
they did steal a lot of what we were gonna say. But yes, it is absolutely still a priority. I think, over the last 18,20 months at this point in time, people have really seen the shift from in the office to work from home to the need for digital transformation to help with real-time visibility of data, collaboration amongst the teams, what is your team actually doing? On top of obviously the ongoing, I need to improve continue to improve my business metrics? And where should i Where should I fish? Where do I need to go to make those efforts pay off. So digital transformation is, to me as important as ever, and I think our customers are, are still seeing it as one of the major areas that they’re focusing on.
Shawn Ryan
Yeah, just to add to that, what you’ve seen is with the pandemic, everyone moving and remote groups have become more and more separated. So where you can at least kind of hang on to things when invoicing was in the same building as billing or as sales, they could walk together, they at least knew what each other was doing. Now we’re getting to the point where they’re completely fragmented, or they’ve been moved to India, they’ve been moved to Mexico, and your only choice is going to be able to use that technology to help to stitch them back together, or to help to get data and information flowing back and forth. Because the majority of those problems, like Dee said, they come from upstream. There, if someone’s not paying you, it’s because you did something wrong. And you’ve got to try to address that and fix that. And the more distant you are, you’re going to have to rely on digital technology to make that efficient.
Essam Elmadhoun
Awesome. Thank you. And I think before we go to the next question, we have a poll question. So in the next two years, what stage of digital maturity do you see in your HR department?
We hope nobody answers Number one, by the way, all via spreadsheets.
You wouldn’t be the first though that is true.
Essam Elmadhoun
You’re gonna make out this time, we’ll give it a few seconds here.
Heather King
A level three, deploying AI-powered solutions for one or more of our teams within AR and Treasury. So that is in the lead followed by level two. We expect you to play our RPA followed by level four and then level one to level three is the winner, followed by level two then level four and then level one.
Essam Elmadhoun
Good. Awesome. I think everyone knows how to use the Whova app. So second, so we talked about kind of how to embark on a digital transformation. But a lot of our leaders look at the business case as kind of that starting point. And there’s a lot of soft benefits that are often overlooked. Can you give us a few examples? , we can start with you have these soft benefits and kind of sorry. So these soft benefits and how they’re important to kind of embark on these digital transformations.
Shawn Ryan
Yeah, so I think there’s two, there are soft benefits. And then there’s the indirect benefits. I mean, in most of our groups, when we look at order to cash, you’re measured as a p&L line item, you are a cost centre. And it’s hard for the rest of the business to see the group as much more than that. But realistically, as decent, you are one of the most frequently touching point touchpoints for the customer after-sales and operations. So that is where a lot of frustration comes in. In our assessments. When we do order to cash reviews, we talk to customers directly. And the number of times that AP departments or procurement buyers, say, Look, your ops are great. But your billing is so bad that I don’t want to work with you anymore. They’re losing sales, because you can’t build cleanly. So that is very hard to measure. That’s very hard to put forward. But if you start building up that data set, it makes the case that this is more than just collections. It’s really helping that and then moving upstream to sales and helping sales understand, hey, this is the true cost of doing business with each of these customers. You’ve got small customers where your cost to invoice collects, did manage deductions and apply cash exceeds the margin you’re making on these customers. Meanwhile, you’ve got big customers who you could be doing a lot more for and winning business and differentiating yourself that you’re not because you’re worried about costs, or that’s not an available option.
Jennifer Jones
Yeah, I would say the two, well, there’s three. But the two biggest is user experience. We touched a little bit D was talking a little bit about it. There’s the old mindset of I’m just a transactional processor. People don’t want to do that anymore, especially now millennials. So and whatever the next, next finials, whatever comes after millennials. But they want to add value. So taking away those non-value-added tasks, and allowing them to automate that and allowing them to focus on things that are really going to help make an impact within the business. That’s a big one that people don’t take into account. And then the second would be allowing collaboration amongst different parties specifically, you just heard a whole I don’t remember $65 million on deductions, right? The whole goal is collaboration to fix that. So that’s the end customer experience. But allowing the team to use the technology to actually provide data, provide real-time insights, work across different teams to not just recollect on invalid, that’s fine and dandy, but stop the deductions from happening altogether. And somebody said earlier, well, you know, got to talk to supply chain into it. Absolutely, you had to talk to the supply chain into is a heck of a lot easier to talk them in anything, when you’ve got real data points and real-time data points. And you’re collaborating. So I think that’s a big, soft business benefit that people don’t really take into account when you’re just looking at, you know, dollars and cents. The other thing I will say, and then I will move to the next question, though, is we have a lot of people that say, you know, I’m only going to look at the hard benefit of how many people can I reduce, so what is my productivity, and they don’t look at what the impact is on their past due on their DSO on their DDO, those are real big dollars or cents. And by the way, to get an ROI, it’s a lot quicker to get an ROI by improving millions of dollars with you know, one day DSO versus reducing by three people. We’re continuously kind of pushing, pushing our clients, our customers to say wait, don’t get stuck in just the people side. Its efficiency, its effectiveness and dollars and cents is really, really important. It’ll provide its own ROI there.
Essam Elmadhoun
No, absolutely. And once you put all that together, what we’ve seen, do you see that AR automation is not as high a priority as it was, let’s say a year ago? And if so, what would you tell HR leaders that? What would they need to do to convince the CFO to kind of make it a higher priority for them?
Jennifer Jones
So I think yes, to a degree but I think it’s also still important, they don’t feel it’s as important because when imminent issue. Everybody was scrambling to say what do I need to do to just be able to work from home be able to have, you know, be able to monitor my team be able to have real-time results? I do think it’s it’s it’s still there. But again, like I just said, the whole dollars and cents. Anytime you’re doing anything from a buying perspective, especially anybody at the CXO level, it’s all about the money. It’s all about the return on investment. So the more that you can prove the business case is positive while increasing your potential customer experience your internal. And when I say customer, by the way, it’s not just the external customers or internal customer invoice to cash works with sales, they work with supply chain, they work with finance, order management, multiple different teams, who are many times way more vocal. I think everybody here in our Kellogg’s friends would all agree the internal customers can sometimes be more vocal than the end customer and that user experience is just as important.
Shawn Ryan
And we view it as four separate drivers for value. And like I said before, a lot of times CFOs, look at this group as it’s a line item on the p&l, I can say it’s that many heads it cost that much. But how many times have you cut a team or cut 10% out of your group. And then all of a sudden, five support people show up in ops or sales now have a new admin that sits in every team that helped do paperwork, it’s like Never mind the fact that I cut ahead from Monterrey, Mexico. And now I’ve just added one in Boston. I mean, the ROI there doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. So it’s helping them understand that one is there’s a cost involved, and that cost goes beyond the p&l. That’s all the adjacent people involved in this. That’s the write-offs. That’s the legal fees. The third party is the licensing for software to route things back and forth, it’s the working capital like you said, it’s able to get a much higher ROI off of working capital. But then this is also the last chance like what D was talking about with deductions, you can secure revenue, you can protect revenue, you can identify where it’s leaking, and that is not trivial. And the better you’re able to get through that backlog. When you’re not dealing with 3700 invoices you have to download and you can really investigate those 10 that aren’t true deductions, those matter quite a bit. And then lastly, and not to be overlooked at all. Again, it’s customer service. And giving those quotes to the CFO, when you hold up a mirror to something they don’t want to see and say you are one out of 10 in terms of billing, I don’t ever want to bill you again. Or I had to beg you for 1300 These are actual quotes, by the way, from clients customers, like I had to beg you for 1300 invoices so I could pay you. Like when they hear those things, it completely changes the idea where now instead of the ROI on HighRadius being like, well, I don’t know, it’s like, Please, can you start tomorrow? Bring the team.
Essam Elmadhoun
Absolutely. And Sean, can you let’s dig a little bit deeper. So now with the disruption to operations in terms of a lot of leaders are thinking do we work from home? Do we work from office offshore onshore? How do you how do you? How can HR leaders convince their what should they think about in terms of do we now disrupt operations with a new software a new way of working? What would you tell them to kind of how do they think about that disruption.
Shawn Ryan
So this again, goes back to like we said, D basically covered most of it. So we’re just up here like riding on her
Jennifer Jones
way report. And we’re naming her. So at least we’re acknowledging,
Shawn Ryan
yeah, but a huge portion of is truly understand the process. So all those add on people that I saw a few people smiling about, we talk about adding a rep here, adding some there, those jobs, and that work is there for a reason because it has to be done. And when you put technology in, that doesn’t incorporate what those tasks are, all of a sudden, that technology can’t function the way it’s supposed to. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s that whoever did the process expectations, didn’t appreciate just how much that person does in the business. And so you have to really deep dive and review what all that is, before you go put the technology in, and then bring that group together and say, I can get rid of that admin as well. Or I need to make sure that admin has access to the solution. So they can help. We had a client that implemented a competitor solution. And they ended up cutting 400 people out of the dispute management process and had to start deploying spreadsheets where previously their legacy solution had workflow routing, that they could access. But because they didn’t choose to invest in the licensing for the new app, they completely went backwards 10 years easily in terms of how they manage disputes, and their AR showed it because nobody took the time to review that mapping it who was doing what before they launched the technology. Yeah.
Jennifer Jones
So one thing I would say is there’s always going to be disruption, and it needs to be an open and honest part of the conversation, it will disrupt Of course any change disrupts just change management is disrupting. There’s no bigger disruption I think that anybody could have ever anticipated then, what March last steer. And everybody made it through the business is better. In many cases, there were some bumps, but the business is better. I think the big thing that, you know, we’ve learned and many of our clients are saying is, I can never be in that position, again, where I’m totally unprepared, I will acknowledge and accept the disruption to future proof my organization. And it’s all right now about trying to predict what’s going to happen. And if there’s a bit of disruption, that’s going to allow whatever comes in the future, and it’s hopefully not another, you know, pandemic like we’re in. But whatever comes in the future, if it’s better, they’re better unable to manage it, then that’s acceptable disruption. So there’s an element of acceptable disruption. But they do acknowledge and we have to everybody has to be open, honest, and anything will disrupt for sure.
Essam Elmadhoun
And let’s add to that. So Jennifer, you know, we talked about, you know, a successful project change management risk and controls process improvement, but sometimes stakeholder management is critical. So what do we tell our leaders? Or who should they communicate with? Who are the main stakeholders? And how should they approach them?
Jennifer Jones
Who is not the main stakeholder? I think, everybody, so anytime we go and do a transformation project, and we work a lot, obviously, with HighRadius you guys do too, right? Along with the clients, it starts out with a three and a box, right, you’ve got a radius, you’ve got the client, you’ve got a consultant, and then each party has its own players coming to the table, where we see I think the biggest miss is it, I don’t think there’s anybody in here who’s implemented HighRadius who didn’t say it got delayed, or they ran into issues because their IT weren’t ready and prepared. So make sure ahead of time, each party each is not just invoice to cash, you’ve got to have people from your supply chain organization from your sales, organization, trade is heavily impacted, right? IT is fundamental, they all need to be at the table. And they all need to clearly understand what’s expected of them what their role is, what their responsibility and what their timelines are from the very beginning, or you will have unhappy stakeholders, but you will also have delays, which is not, which is not good for anybody. So it’s it’s key to bring everybody to the table immediately.
Shawn Ryan
Yeah, and this is, every one of these groups is going to be involved. And whether it’s sales, whether it’s ops, I think every one of them has bad experiences with virtually every IT implementation they’ve had, regardless of if it’s order to cash or not. So you’ve really got to get in there and understand what is valuable to them and sell it to them on a terms of how it’s going to help them. So for sales, I can help you sell more, I can increase your commissions for ops, I’m going to decrease the number of times I have to call you to go find a bill of lading or to go down to the dock and find out when you actually ship this, like you’ve got to get down to those areas and really take their input on what’s broken on their side, again, find all those pockets of work that are being done outside of your vertical and really bring it into the fold. And then that’s going to help them run forward. Because the last thing you need is one salesperson using one anecdote about one big customer and going to the CEO and your project is done. It is stalled and that I’ve seen it I’m sure you’ve seen it where everything’s on hold three months full review of what goes on, and then the project just dies under its own weight. Those are the things you’ve got to avoid upfront. Yes.
Essam Elmadhoun
Yeah. And to add to that, I think, so when we’re talking about IT implementations and kind of the delay, there are also third-party stakeholders that need to know and are aware, you know, the banking portals, you know, contracts that are almost up just to make sure that they know ahead of time before implementation starts. To be aware. Yep. Awesome. Q&A. Yes.
Heather King
All right, who’s got a question for our illustrious panel? Oh, boy. Wow.
Like it’s after lunch. To answer every single question that anyone could possibly ever have.
Good. Oh, no. D did. We’re just up here. Any questions
for commission a kickback from this?
Heather King
Alright, I’m not gonna I’m not gonna force the issue. So let’s give our panel a big round of applause. Thank you.
