Joseph Grass: [00:05]
So driving success in digital finance. This is how we did it.
Chason Dancer: [00:12]
So now we’re here at the eight steps of a successful finance transformation project. For us personally, this was over half a year, a very long and meticulous project. Every day, living and breathing this whole project. And it starts with scope, selecting the right vendor, planning, design, configuration, testing and training deployment and the final and ongoing step of maintaining.
Joseph Grass: [00:41]
So scope, determination. What do you need? So determining the scope of your transformation project correctly is key to this. So. At our company, we were seeing close to $30 million gap in cash monthly. So that was on into in so we’re talking collections, cash boosting and everything in between. So at some point we said we’ve got to do something to improve this, to close that gap and to tie our processes in together. So how do you select your partner? You spend time looking at the right partner and evaluate their capabilities. So I can tell you personally and we’ve done this to different companies, this group came over with me to DXP actually from Prior Life, our company. And so we’ve gone through this and you really have to spend the right kind of time going through the vendor selection process to make sure that they offer the products and services and the support model to get you through the finish line and then down the road. Right. We had experience with HighRadius. So for us, it was a pretty easy choice. Honestly, in the DXP we didn’t look at any other vendors. We had them call. But at some point we were just like, Hey, we already know who we’re going to go with and we know what they can do for us. And we moved on with the project. So planning phase ensure your processes and systems are ready for transformation. We put together a plan to basically implement three products across our business at one time. So most people I talk to, folks call us for referrals. Why would you be so crazy to do that? We had such large and large gaps on the AR side and what we were trying to accomplish seemed so far off without automation. We decided to just take the Big Bang approach and rip the Band-Aid off. And we thought if we could align our resources internally and we could align with HighRadius on the implementation and support side, that we weren’t really too concerned. So Blueprint designed your systems to truly visualize. You are to be state. So we spent a lot of time in this area. We were trying to figure out what we were going to do and how far down the road we wanted to achieve. What we were trying to do in something that we put in place had to be there long term. We didn’t want to implement something and then a year later decide that it wasn’t going to work for us. And we want to shift gears.
Steven Griebe: [03:23]
And configure the digital part of your transformation in action. It’s very important to pay attention to all the details. Make sure you ask a lot of questions. Make sure your technology partners are working closely, collaborating seamlessly through the process. Ensure that your new systems are working well with legacy systems and ERP system, etc. and make sure that you create a contingency plan for any system integration, failure or manage any delays coming up. So yeah, HighRadius is just really good with meeting on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis between all the teams. Make sure everything was flowing really well.
Joseph Grass: [04:07]
Yeah, I would just say sometimes it’ll seem like you talk to them too much, but there’s no such thing as too much time. The more time you spend with your implementation partner, the better off you will be in catching things that aren’t working in the beginning.
Steven Griebe: [04:23]
Test and train. This is a big part. This is how you see everything come together, how it’s going to flow out. It’s really, really important. You get your small group together, make sure everything’s flowing out before you pass it on to your team. But UAT is a big part of it where you can fix any issues before making the solution available to your group. Conduct training in partnership with your vendor and make sure everyone on your team knows how to use this new system. So that was something I know, particularly on my side was they were really good and very thorough with the testing and make sure that everything came out well.
Chason Dancer: [05:04]
Deployment time to see if you got it right. There’s going to be some bumps at that time. That’s one of my favorite parts of this is the hyper care phase. And this is I like to call it my safety blanket phase because this is the last time you’re having those daily calls for a couple of hours every morning to make sure all those little kinks it worked out. And that’s most important here, I think, to be very realistic. We went live with cash application collections in October, November, December, and we had to postpone it a little bit because it was just not realistic to have it roll out at that time. It wasn’t because of us, it wasn’t because of HighRadius. But there’s other partners out there like Worldpay who can kind of make the effort a little bit tougher to get to that finish line. So and this is the last and final stage maintaining even today, four months later, we’re still in constant communication with HighRadius about things. We can do a little bit better. We implement this. Can we change that? It’s really where I felt like we have a lifelong partner now because they’re not going anywhere. They’re always there for us when we need them or if we need to do any kind of enhancements. So that’s why I think it’s critical that you pick the partner that will work best for you and the solutions you’re trying to get.
Steven Griebe: [06:21]
So in conclusion, those are your eight steps. You want to ensure that value delivery in our way or at the top of your mind at every stage of your transformation project. Yep.
Chason Dancer: [06:34]
Thanks again.
Steven Griebe: [06:35]
Thank you.
