Sarah FaneSarah Fane [0:00]
Hello ladies and gentlemen and a very warm welcome to today’s webinar brought to you by Shared Services link and sponsored by high radius. Today we’ll be looking at digitally transforming order-to-cash at event D. My name is Sarah Fane and I am the Head of Research at Shared Services link. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Tony Hiatt, who’s the credit manager at Ivanti, and Elaine Nowak who’s the Director of Product Management and Marketing at HighRadius. Let’s touch on a little bit of context and why we’re doing this webinar today. Digital Transformation is something that’s really happening everywhere we look. Now, if you want to book a taxi, you no need to call someone up or visit a taxi rank, you can press a button on your phone, and someone arrives, I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a check because all payments are now online. And often when we interact with customer services through an online portal, you’re often talking to a robot as your first point of call. So technology has really reinvented many of the day-to-day processes that we interact with. Now in shared services, it’s a bit of a different story and a different journey. This is something that’s been thrown around in boardrooms for quite a while people talking about digital transformation is something that needs to be done. But maybe hasn’t been happening on the ground level yet. However, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic change in the last two years, we’re now shared services. Some are even seeing how they dedicated digital transformation or innovation budget, and are really realizing the need to embrace innovation, and digitally transform. So today we’ll be looking at shared services, but particularly order to cash and how the advanced technology is really starting to change the order to cash landscape. Ivanti has used high radius and has a great story. And just some of the highlights that we’ll be talking about today is about how they use AI to predict payment terms, how they’ve improved productivity, leveraged better information about their team, and are supporting the business’s growth. So with that, I would now like to hand it over to Elaine Nowak from HighRadius.
Sarah FaneElaine Nowak [1:56]
Thank you so much, Sarah, appreciate that. So, looking at the shared services, the need to consolidate services for the maximum benefit across the organization has now been identified as a company goal. So the shared service concept is now going to be embraced. And when a shared service center is first implemented, the primary focus is on cost reduction. To achieve cost reduction, the organization goes ahead and standardizes their operations and they want to do this in order to enhance efficiency. And a shared service center provides that consistency so that processes can be carried out in the same manner, regardless of locations, geographies, and all of this to save money. But to achieve maximum effect. A shared service center must look beyond this simple cost reduction to incorporate cost-effectiveness. This is the ability to enhance value by not just saving a few dollars, but by driving bottom-line impact. The Shared Services Center should strive to improve customer relationships and service delivery, while also scaling to support business growth and increase profitability. Now how does an organization get from the early stage of shared services that are focused on cost reduction to the next generation of cost-effectiveness? The key driver is digital transformation. And if we look at the factors I just mentioned, improving customer relationships and service delivery enhanced value by driving bottom-line impact and supported business scalability and profitability, executing a digital transformation would have a tremendous impact in all these areas. Now according to an MIT Sloan Capgemini survey, digital transformation could have resounding effects across the entire organization. In the survey, almost 1600 senior executives participated in this study. And they reported that more than just front-end improvements that they saw in digital transformation, digital was also enhancing their business operations. It was helping them refine their business models. And it was giving them the ability to offer much more to their customers. These digital technologies that they were putting in place for their shared services provided a collaborative flexible set of access points to all their shared services information. And the digital impacts service delivery by reducing costs and reducing errors. It enables compliance, it provides better service, and thereby improves customer satisfaction. So this creates overall a much more user-friendly work environment. It helps to deliver fast and accurate business insights. And it just makes it easier to leverage new technology in general. So now what I’m going to do is hand it over to Tony of Ivanti to share with us his real-life digital transformation and the success story. Tony!
Sarah FaneTony Hiatt [4:55]
Hello everyone. My name is Tony Hiatt. I am a global credit manager for Ivanti. And I will be speaking with you and sharing with you our transformation and how we have incorporated technology and HighRadius into our work and what we have seen. Digital transformation, well, for us it came down to three aspects, we wanted processes improvements, that would enhance performance. Could we do this? Could we be at the size we were the scalability and maintain that through our growth? And then where we were also struggling was being able to report and actually have some standardized reports that we could be able to share with our upper management, where we’re going to start off with, with our process and performance, what we needed to do was revamp, reorganize and redo the themes that we worked. To enhance work differently, this was going to be the first step that we really wanted to dive into and would we feel would have the biggest impact going forward. Before automation. As you can imagine, most companies and we were no different is we had a very manual process. We were working off Excel spreadsheets, we had no way of getting call logs, no way of tracking who we talked to when we talked to the big manual process of doing VLOOKUP. And bringing notes over to the new spreadsheets. So in fact, what we were doing was we were dialing for dollars at that point. And that’s where we were struggling. And our reps were just barely keeping their heads above water. So this is where we were before automation. What we wanted to enhance was we wanted automation in our guns. So before we had manual dunning through email, we didn’t have call logs, were basically a couple of notes, we were not able to cover our account load, we would not be able to contact every customer in a month, we were unable to isolate and be able to track our disputes. Our reporting was made up by geo. So we would have to collect different reporting from different business units to be able to put them into one. So this was the collection process. It was basically mailing and trying to get who we could get with our customer contacts, we had a hard time keeping track, updating our customer contacts, being able to have a central place where we could hold that information. We were unable to track tasks, schedule follow-ups, those were all the areas that we were missing, that we did not have before automation. The automation collection operations that we have, with HighRadius was we were able to have an automated priority worklist. This was very big for us. The collectors would come in, they can log into the HighRadius system. And right there, they would have to know who they had to work on that day. And that was based off the rules and what we wanted to stay into the system what we felt was the priority. And where we were missing out. We had our automated invoices going out, we had those being attached with our correspondence, we had automated reminders. So we had proactive reminders that would go out to customers five days before the due date, and it would have the invoice attached. That was one area we did not have before. We had collection notes, we were able to have call history. When we talk to the customer how many times we talked to the customer, we have a centralized area for our contacts, where we can put our contacts at and store all marked information in one spot. The automated collections. These were the big wins for us in this. As you can see, we did not have these before, the impact it’s had now automated. The prioritization of the worklist, as I said was a big game saver when we actually took this down and took how much time it spent us to organize the worklist for our AR specialists. It took about two hours a day for one person to organize this list. With that gone. The prioritization of the work list that we had, it just, it was a big impact and not just for us but for the AR specialists as well. That was one of their big frustrations. points. Now they can come in log into the system. And they would exactly know what they had to work on without having to sort and filter through an Excel spreadsheet. The next box, the Dunning across all accounts. Before, we were not even touching probably half of our accounts with our manual process of sending out. So we enhanced, were able to contact every customer on our list. This was a big step for us in the sense that before our lower dollar customers under 20,000, they were not hearing from us before now they’re getting notices. Now everybody thinks dunning, they think automation, they think that you know, the customer is going to receive the message and automatically know that it’s an automated generated message. Well, that’s not the fact. With us and with HighRadius, we were able to mask our email. So when the email went out to the customer, the customer actually thought they were receiving a message from that AR specialist. It had a Ivanti on the email, it didn’t have a no reply, it had the signature of that AR specialist that was responsible for that account. And so when the customer would reply to the email, it would actually go right back to our AR specialist, so that we can communicate. Our strategy in the sense with the Dunning being automated, you know, across the accounts was, you know, let’s start bringing the customers to us, let’s start getting the quick wins with customers that just need to be reminded. This impacted our cash flow in a big way. Now to go back to improve collectors productivity, this goes into the automation, we filled in the automation to do exactly what we wanted the collector to do. We strained it across our expectations of how many times we wanted the collector to contact the customer. And we filled all of that in with automation. We looked at what manual processes are processes that they do now that are reoccurring, enhanced with what can we automate in that. And that’s what we did which enhanced, it brought more of a focus on our strategic accounts. So with us, we want our AR specialists focusing on accounts over 60 days. That’s where we want them to spend their time. And that’s where we want them to dig in. Because usually, if an account is over 60, there’s an issue of some sort. And that’s where we wanted them to spend the time to be able to get in there and research accounts, which the automation that we have in place. The prioritization of the worklist that we had in place, was allowing our AR specialist to spend a lot of time improve their time 90% up that they can actually sit there and work through one account, which enhanced, changed our strategy to what we kind of say around here now is touch the account once do everything you can do to touch that account once and be done. Most cases, that’s not the case. But that’s a mindset that we have now is now they can just sit there and research and do what needs to be done on that account. Now reporting and framework, the reporting that we had was non existent in an aspect, we had to collect reports from our offices and different geos. And then we had to take that information and put it into one report and try and standardize what our reports look like, which you know, you get them from different areas, not everybody’s on the same page. So everybody’s information comes across a little different. So we’ll go ahead and I can share that with you now of how we took that journey. What we were missing on a geo level also was awaiting to track our employees performance. As you know, this is a very important aspect. We had a difficult time being able to judge an individual’s performance. We didn’t know exactly how many accounts they touched him what they did. Now with HighRadius, we were able to cut that and able to be able to track what they have done and accounts they have touched. We had a lot of chances of miss promotions and so forth. Now as you can see the in depth KPIs for employees, we were able to see how that impacted them. Where we saw opportunity where we could do some coaching, or be able to help AR specialists, that was having issues to get them back on track, and also be able to promote and help them with their journeys here with us to be able to do their job more efficiently and effectively. Now, dashboards, as you know, most executives, they don’t like to hear a story, they just like to see the picture, and be able to tell what it’s about. So with us before we had no dashboards, we had the lack of visibility across our organization for our business units, we had the data that was coming in was, you know, as I said, Everybody likes to put their data differently, overall, the performance matrix with us, we were able to do, Jim to where it was on a geo level, on a global level, and be able to take this data and be able to set where we needed to go next, and have correct measurements and how we can measure ourselves and be able to get to where we needed to go. As you can see here, this is a sample of the analytics that we have. Here, we’re able to track anything down from a geo level, like I said, a geo level, a global level, a collector level, a team level, we are able to track everything, and have these KPIs right here in visual, we are able to send this with a simple request from our executive management, that we can send these reports, we no longer have to create these reports, these reports are updated every day within the HighRadius system. This has saved us a long hours of work a day that we would have to come in and also allow us to standardize our reports, everything was the same, everything was coming across that was wanting to be seen and wanted to be seen. So this helped us in the sense of being able to standardize also over to measure performance matrix on a geo individual level. As I said before, this helps with when it came came time for promotions, or came time for recognition for teams in certain areas. Now, the effective engine analyst, this actually was another good step that we wanted to complete in our system that we did not have before, the working with spreadsheets. We were always working on old data. Data that we had from the previous day or previous day before that. This gave us really no real time data that we had, we had difficulty for the collection teams to be able to focus on high risk delinquent accounts. Like I said before with the spreadsheets, this actually was hurting us in the sense of not being able to focus, like I said before on those high delinquent accounts. And that’s where we were getting a lot of our past due, kind of our pipeline was getting plugged with this stuff that wasn’t being able to be escalated and circled out. Here, we were able to focus on what we felt was important and have that visualized. For example, here you have the top 10 delete accounts. This is something that we were able to not have to filter, go through a spreadsheet, or an AR and try and get this data out. We were able to have this data very accessible up to date, and be able to break our aging apart how we wanted to see it and what we wanted to see. So the scalability, what we were worried about. And what we had in mind when we were coming into high radius was we put in all these process improvements. We do all this effective and efficient steps in how is that going to help us over growth? How are we going to handle the increase of you know, our business growing at 20% a year? Are we going to have to add in more headcount? Is this going to help us? Are we able to you know, is it scalability is the digital world going to be able to to subsidize what we would enhance need workforce for? So this was something that we were definitely getting into and we had a concern for with putting in technology or will this be enough for us is enhances the question. We were looking at this growth as okay, we’re going to grow 20% a year. We have had this for the last two years, we have not had to add one headcount, we have continued to be efficient and been able to do some new themes add to the system that we are working with high radius on, that has saved us more time. We are actually going through a couple more acquisitions, we’ve gone through some acquisitions already. And it has caused no interruption whatsoever. With our collection process and our collection on to these new accounts that we have got from these acquisitions. They have been able to go into our automation and our system into our ERP. Very simple. We’ve been able to upload the information that we need, as far as contacts and so forth, into the HighRRadius system. So through this, we actually were seeing that there was no interruption whatsoever with our collection process. And automation just took off from day one when we brought in these new accounts. So what I wanted to get into here is the big focus that we liked, was our Cash Forecasting. We had no Cash Forecasting, before, we had no way of knowing when our customers were going to pay except if we talked to him, we had no way of knowing it was very unpredictable. Basically, we were guessing every month on who was going to pay us. Now, as you know, the cash forecast, it’s an assumption, you’re thinking that, you know, a customer’s going to pay or or pay in a certain week, we had no visibility on this. Now with HighRadius, what we have done is we have a cash forecast model that runs off of rules and logic and some AI, and it’s really quite impressive. So the cash forecast that we have is a seven week cash forecast. And what this cash forecast does is has some rules generated that we have in it for customer behavior. But in simple terms, it takes the invoice goes off of the customer’s independent payment later. And, and determines from that time when they are going to pay. From that time. We have a seven week as I said a seven week cash forecast that allows us to have up to seven weeks of what we have available on the AR back time. So enhance that’s how we’re able to determine when it’s going to pay. With this what we have found with our forecast model was we actually wanted to see okay, how accurate are we in this forecast model? Right now with our forecast model, we are about $100,000 above what is forecasted, which puts us pretty close in the sense and and where we are now in the sense of where our aging is and where we stand today. And this is something we are very proud of over here at Ivanti. We were at 32% over 60 days, that was big. We are now, we have no invoices over 90 days. And we have under 2% total past due. This is really big for us. The first year we saw a big increase in cash, the automation and the proactive reminders everything that we have put in place. We are seeing that we are changing customer payment behaviors in the way that they pay us. We are proactive more because our AR team has the time to be able to spend on accounts. With us automating their whole process that they do that as I said before, we took all the work that they did on a daily basis that was refunded and redone and we automated it. This has been huge and we’ve seen the payout here. And there is no doubt with us that we are going to continue to strive to put more automation, more technology, more AI with HighRadius to be able to see how we can continue to get better because now that we’ve improved our over 60 Now we’re looking at okay, let’s now see what we can put into place to try and improve our 30 to 60. So that’s where we are at today with HighRradius. So the lessons that we have learned here at Ivanti we are a software company we know technology is a necessity. Our AR people, our team here at Ivanti, know that that it’s not a constraint, it will only enhance what they can do and what they can get done, our employees are very encouraged. And now they actually embrace what technology can help their performance and help them with their their daily tasks, it has put off a lot of stress that was once on our AR team, like I had an AR person tell me, before this, I was barely keeping my head above water. So the technology has helped them within their job and their performance. With this, you would need to have effective training, we went through quite a bit of training with our team. And we actually have some seniors that are helping coaching that are what we call HighRadius experts. And they go around helping the team and with training we have known this, you know, use the system in the sense you don’t use it against you. So effective training was a big part. With our mergers and acquisitions, we have no fear or hiccups that come with our transitions that come in, we know that they’ll fold right into high radius. And we won’t lose a step on our collections on those. With us it’s, you know, the technology, that digital transformation. And you combine that with the people, honestly, the people in technology that is what’s going to sustain the business, and that is going to make you successful in your business.
Sarah FaneSarah Fane [26:41]
That’s great. Well, thank you very much, Tony, for really great session. And I will now hand you over to Elaine from HighRadius.
Sarah FaneElaine Nowak [26:50]
Okay, thank you Sarah. And thank you, Tony, for great presentation. Tremendous insights, I think it was excellent. But just to talk a little bit about HighRadius, we are headquartered in Houston, Texas. And we’ve been offering solutions for accounts receivable and credit for more than a dozen years, we are the only provider of an integrated receivables platform. And this platform provides end to end solutions for the entire order to cash. Our expertise and experience are founded on our cloud based products suites for Receivables Management and automation. And this has helped position us as the market leader, especially in the Fortune 1000, where we’re actually ranked number one among AR solution providers. Couple years back now, we’ve secured a number of investments to help fund our continued growth and expansion. And to give you a sense of our size, we process upwards of 1 trillion, 1 trillion with a T, and receivables annually for our customers. We have reached 1000 plus employees globally, with offices in the US, in the UK and in India. So here’s a quick glance at a partial list of the customers who use HighRadius. You can see many household names, many well recognized brands, they’re sometimes very large corporations that in other cases, they are midsize or smaller corporations that we have products that can help solutions across different industries, different revenue sizes, different organization sizes. Over the course of our experience, we’ve done more than 650 transformation projects. So helping enable that digital transformation that we talked about in our webinar today. How important that is to be able to achieve the objectives for organizations, and the ability to embrace that technology and bring organizations to the next generation for their future endeavors. On talking about the integrated receivables platform itself, we have the credit cloud, which will help you get new customers on board faster and it helps manage ongoing credit risk with existing customers as well and offers segmentation, credit strategies, integrates with all different kinds of credit data, and whatever subscription systems that you might have. Our electronic invoice presentment and payment cloud gives you a platform that engages customers digitally and gives the option to view invoices, view statements, make payments and log disputes all on a branded portal that would be branded with your company name and information. We also have a cash application cloud, which helps you to automatically apply your payments once they are received. And it eliminates the manual tasks involved in the process. It’s able to take remittance in whatever format it might be in whether it’s EDI files or PDFs whether it’s in the body of an email or it’s in the attachment. It’s also able to send out automated robots, bots that actually log into different portals websites and extract the information as needed, whatever remittance information is available, and it also populates that in the system and auto closes out open invoices. Our deductions cloud, what we find that customers may not always pay the invoice in full. So what the deductions cloud does is it helps manage the short payments, and it helps to resolve disputes faster, it’s able to get all the backup information, claims information, PODs, whatever it is, collects that information and is able to set up your deductions, the studies for your research more quickly. And lastly, the collections Cloud helps you to create strategies and prioritize the work lists. It’s a dynamic work list that is updated continuously. And this allows your teams to actually follow up with their customers faster, to be able to have all the information readily available to when they do reach out. They know exactly what they need from that customer for that day, and the recommendations of which are the touch points and how you should be contacting your customers. So each of the five modules that we have are very mature solutions. They’ve got very deep functionality with robust capabilities. And they were designed and built organically by HighRadius. So they all have the same look and feel and ease of use and the intractability that’s available within our modules. And because we started many years ago in the SAP market, we work with some of the largest global companies. We designed and built our cloud platform architecture based on the highest scalability, resiliency and performance standards. So this is one of the main reasons why we have a higher than 95% client subscription renewal rate for our products.
Sarah FaneSarah Fane [31:24]
That’s great. Thank you Elaine for that great presentation as well as some impressive statistics there. Just wanted to take another opportunity to thank the team at Ivanti and HighRadius for all the prep that has gone into this and also for everyone on the webinar. And we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank You and Goodbye.
