Jamie Garbis: [00:05]
So my name is Jamie Garbis. I am the vice president of Credit Collections and Treasury for Anderson Group. And due to my introduction there, I’m going to tell you a little bit about our success story, partnering with HighRadius and PNC Bank, which is who we are at the core of our banking. So what are we going to be talking about today as we go through this conversation? You’re going to see five key points that we kind of touched base on. The first one is the scaling of operations at Addison Group. The second is the operational challenges that we face during this period of hypergrowth. The third is a strategy for achieving our future objectives with automation. First, our automation journey with HighRadius, and lastly, our future goals and implementations. So a little bit about the Singapore professional service firm. We sell people, we build on time, and material we supply to a diverse market group. Finance and accounting. I.T. Digital Marketing Non-clinical Health Care Administration. We have a direct hire search consulting and the finance accounting space as well as I.T. so high-end implementations for ERP, things like that.
Jamie Garbis: [01:13]
Currently 800 million in revenue. As you heard, we are about 200 billion in revenue about ten years ago. So rapidly growing. Headquartered in Chicago were all domestic, 25 plus offices coast to coast, and 5000 employees. And rapidly growing organically and through acquisitions. And the acquisitions will be important as this conversation goes on, because you’ll see how it adds complexity. So the whole question out there is, what is the most significant challenge a company is facing with its current cash app process, multiple events, formats, the expense of lockbox services, manual exception coding, or lack of visibility. And I can tell you pre automation, we suffered from all four of those. All of them were problems that we had to deal with. So hypergrowth equals greater operational challenges. What does that mean? The first thing is less engaging work for your employees. A lot of the positions that we had pre-automation were very data entry, very manual, a lot of paper printing, emails, printing word docs, printing, excel files, anything that had remittance on it.
Jamie Garbis: [02:20]
You know, that’s what employees were doing all day. Not a great role. Hard to get good people doing that for our customer experience. You know, a lot of times we have our air team reaching out to clients, sending a statement. Call them on past invoices. The clients come back and they say, Why are you calling us? We paid this, you know, a week ago and we’re just behind a cash app and they’re right. So the clients are frustrated. The salespeople is calling our team. You’re making me look bad, you know, frustrating experience for the client, not something that you want to deal with. Increased demand for cash app professionals. Right. As we got bigger, it was we went from 200, 300, 400, 500. The only way that we could scale without automation was to add more bodies. So very expensive. Not a good solution. And again, multiple ERPs are adding to the complexity. So as we grow, we grow organically and through acquisition.
Jamie Garbis: [03:11]
Whenever we do an acquisition, the goal is to fold it into our core machine. Right? We want to get it on our CRM, our ERP, and our bank. But you can’t do that on day one, right? Because you can’t break revenue processes. You can’t just rip the code out from under, you know, so it takes time. So we’re running multiple ERPs. Are all those things happening up to, you know, a pretty big problem for us? So order to cash landscape before automation. So now where we’re at now. Kind of important to see where we’re at before. As I just said, multiple ERP is I’m running billing on six instances of that suite right now. Our core machine is Microsoft Dynamics GP and actually, in the last three months, we just added another acquisition. They’re running out of financial force. So I’m running Billion Cash App accounting through multiple ledgers, and a lot of transactions. We bill our clients weekly. We’re doing over 4000 invoices a week, sometimes a weekly, sometimes every two weeks, sometimes they’re monthly, sometimes it’s some other way.
Jamie Garbis: [04:08]
Sometimes it’s in a portal, with very diverse client needs, and that turns into a lot of cash apps, right? If you’re doing 4000 invoices, you’re probably doing 4000 cash transactions in a week. That’s high up to that. So a lot of manual hours are spent on Cash App to support those invoices. So Cash app was manual and redundant. So the entire process, it was manual. It was expensive. It was paper-heavy. I already kind of talked about it, but one of the roles was for an employee to come in, literally go through an email inbox, and spend all day printing maybe one or 200 emails. The attachments that went with it, you know, a PDF, an Excel file, the body of an email, whatever it would be. Then logging into one of our eight banks, printing the report, taking all those papers that they just printed, and matching it up to the bank report, hopefully getting the correct match. After that, they had to take that report, go to one of our eight 910 ERP that was on, and hopefully posts that transaction correctly.
Jamie Garbis: [05:13]
So and it took bodies to do that right. As we got bigger first it was one person and it was two then it was three or four or five people doing this data entry job. So expensive and totally not scalable. Right. Our forecast shows growth. It shows acquisitions. We know we’re going to get bigger. We can’t keep doing it that way. So we tried to solve the problem internally at first, as all good finance people do, try to save money, try to find an answer on our own. We went to it and it became clear very quickly that it cannot help us solve this problem. They don’t have the technology to scan their emails, match transactions, the bank, or pass. They just didn’t have that in-house. So we tried to solve it internally in the finance team, and what that turned into was more bodies. And that was not a good answer, not something our CEO or CFO liked to hear. Now that we don’t want to add bodies to the organization, we don’t want to add bodies to do data entry, we want the value to add work.
Jamie Garbis: [06:15]
So we decided to bring in automation. We knew what the target objectives were, right. First and foremost, scale the air operation. We need to make sure the system was flexible. We knew we were going to be going on multiple ERPs. Multiple banks need to be able to connect to all of that and we needed to eliminate the gaps that already existed with our current ERP. Other things that we thought about as we were kind of going through the process. We wanted to minimize internal dependencies. You know, there have been plenty of times when something went down in finance, right? And you need it to get you back up. But I see has got some other competing priorities. You know, maybe finance software goes down while fun and they get the I.T. support first. If we went down, we didn’t want it to wait on our internal I.T. team to slow down our cash operation. We’ve got a large customer base, you know, more than 4000 clients. And each client has a bunch of different contacts.
Jamie Garbis: [07:08]
So you add that all up. Each needs their invoices in a different way. We’re going to be paid a different way. Need to be able to support that. And I needed to ensure better visibility into our processes and the leadership. So what that means is every Monday morning when I talk to the CEO and CFO, you know, I don’t want to say that I had five people post 5000 transactions and an ERP for 20 million of cash last week. Not a good use of five resources, right? I want to say, hey, we posted all these transactions, all the cash is posted, and here’s cash for cash, one for each ERP that shows how much cash we’re going to have in 13 weeks that had redistributed to the company. So why HighRadius? You know, for us, it was a really easy decision to choose the HighRadius. We did our homework. We saw a lot of demos. There are a lot of products out there that do similar things. If you’re lucky, you’ll find them.
Jamie Garbis: [07:59]
But for us, HighRadius was a preferred partner of PNC. The core of our banking is with PNC, so there was already a built relationship there, which meant a lot of trust. We’ve been with PNC for a long time. It also had an incredibly competitive price, so we’re getting a good price. In addition, there were other customers with PNC that were already on HighRadius. So we got a ton of good references and we got references from companies, with similar business models to us, lots of transactions, lots of ERP is using the model across multiple banks and it was working for them and we got to talk to them and they describe their issues and what was going well, what wasn’t. And we trusted that. And also we knew. Is going to integrate with existing systems because I talked to people that use it. So the fact that a pre-existing relationship was there with PMC in HighRadius, you know, it made it a very, very easy choice for us. So bank plus fintech equals improved customer experience.
Jamie Garbis: [08:57]
You know, they got it there. Teamwork makes the dream work. Before that partnership with PNC and here, it is, all manual, very expensive, a lot of paper, and a poor process. You know, in today’s landscape, completely automated remittance capture, auto extraction of invoicing, and tracking automatically increased visibility into our processes. And the last bullet point was the seamless integration. I’ve got a ton of integrations in there. As you know, after 15 years in finance, the HighRadius cash app, one specific one of the easiest ones that I’ve ever done. You know, I finance, I’m not tech. I’m an accountant from Naperville, Illinois. I don’t know how to code things, but I was able to go through the design phase. The research and development phase, the issues, implementation, hyper care pretty much independently of my i.t, which was big, you know, that was good it was a good experience. And a lot of times I was integrations are not good experiences, so I had to call that out.
Jamie Garbis: [09:56]
So cash app drivers now, right? We talked about it. It was manual, it was expensive. It was paper-heavy, well through HighRadius. Yes, we’ve achieved a lot of efficiencies. My employees are no longer printing paper. They’re doing value add activities in addition to the cash app. I’m getting more productivity out of the team. Remittances were aggravated across different sources and linked with payments by hand. We talked about this, right? People were printing paper. They were matching payments to bank reports. Not a good use of time. Well, now the solution automatically does that for us. No more going through the paper, no more matching to bank reports. We’re getting that all happening within the cloud solutions today. Invoice lookup and matching. Time-consuming process. Manually posting in the ledger. Very time-consuming process. You know four or 5000 transactions a week taking more than 40 hours a week for multiple employees. Well, now it’s Man or it’s manual.
Jamie Garbis: [10:52]
It’s automatically matching open invoices with the payments on the day that they’re received. And I no longer have team members going into ops and manually posting transactions. I’m getting a nice CSV file or a direct feed from the ERP from the solution to automatically post the payments. The entire process was not scalable and not in sync with expected growth. While you go back three years ago, I had three people posting cash receipts for the company. We were smaller. We were about 500 million in revenue then we’re over 800 million now. I have one person posting cash for the entire company and we’re integrating with multiple employees. It’s 110 banks, hundred payments made globally. So a very, very good, effective solution, very flexible. So results numbers don’t lie. We got about 70% automation achieved in the cash application. 80% hit rate on transactions. About 60% of our analyst time is now being focused on cash forecasting and other analysis. And I just said it, you know, primarily we have one employee posting cash for the entire company.
Jamie Garbis: [11:54]
So our journey with HighRadius, the road ahead, look, we’re going to continue to optimize the cash app solution. We’re getting bigger. We’re buying companies. We’re getting paid in different ways. You know, we’re invoicing out a different ERP, but it grows with you. You know you got to maximize it, you got to work with it. So we’re going to continue to do that and get the most out of that product. But what I’m really excited about is about a month ago we went live on the collections cloud. You know, our collections process is also very archaic, very manual downloading age trial balances from ERP is using Excel files to sort for the worst client manually drafting emails to clients and statements of manually pulling PDF invoices from drives to follow up. Well, we’ve pretty much eliminated that entire process. It’s all done. Click on a button now through the collection cloud. You know, just the other day I sent 5000 statements with the push of a button. You know, it would have taken me forever to do that before I would have had to build some complicated access tool to do that.
Jamie Garbis: [12:50]
For me, probably 50% of my time is when getting back to our collection analysts. You know, they’re no longer doing those activities. They’re kind of on offense now and not playing defense. We got to attack in the right accounts because we have that whole workflow automated and we talked about the acquisition, we just bought one. We’ve been in the clutch in product for a month. I’ve already sucked that acquisition into the collections module as well as the Cash app. So really excited to start with the stuff that we’re doing with that product. Food for thought. Why is automation important? You know, first of all, it’s can improve your cash cycle. It’s going to be a better experience for your customer. Talks about it at the beginning. Back in the day, we were aggravating clients. Call them on invoices they already paid. They’re getting better customer service. The salespeople are happier. Future support and growth for rapidly growing businesses. You know, as I said, we’re probably $1,000,000,000 by the end of the year.
Jamie Garbis: [13:43]
I got one person posting cash. I don’t need other bodies there, you know, as long as we’re getting the most out of that product. And for me right now, you know, considering the great resignation and retaining staff, our employees are happy because they’re not doing that crap work anymore. You know, it really was a poor position to go through all that paper. You know, they’re working on forecasting and they’re doing analysis to see if we’re getting the best rates. They’re looking at our competitors from a cash perspective, DSO analysis, things like that. So no turnover on my team. Very happy people. So that’s our experience. You know, we’ve really enjoyed these products we’re going to continue to work with. I wouldn’t be up here talking about it if we didn’t have a lot of success with it. So thanks. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.
