Choosing the Right Vendor

Tisha Clausell:

Once again, I’m Tisha Clausell, and today we’re going to talk about how you should choose the right vendor. Some of the agenda items they’re saying is going to cover, She’s gonna cover building relationships with your vendor. The road map for the objectives and how to evaluate the vendor. So when you build a relationship with a vendor, it’s very important. So one thing you always want to do is stay involved. I have about five different vendors that I work with personally, and so I always try to make them feel like they are part of the company. So I share my company’s goals that I have with them, so they can know that they actually impact Zurich’s goals and that they feel like they are also a part. So both parties should always work together to improve the process. So it’s a collaboration with your vendor. You always keep the lines of communication open by attending webinars, conferences and outside meetings. I go to India at least once a year. Last year I went three times, but at least for all my vendors, I either try to go and see them or actually have meetings with them over the phone conferences.

Tisha Clausell:

Be the first one to know what’s going on. Like with HighRadius, I come to this conference every year to find out what new things they have opened that I didn’t know about. I look at how other customers are using HighRadius as well. So let’s take a poll question. What are some of the best practices do you follow at your companies to ensure you’re building a relationship with your vendor? By a show of hands, you have frequent meetings with your customers.

Tisha Clausell:

Do you meet with them in person or maybe just over the phone? And do you visit the annual conference? I think that I see some people that I have known, I have seen them here for the last few years. So I know they do the same as us. But now I’m actually going to tie it over to Sandy and she’ll go into more about building your relationship with your vendor. Thank you, Sandy.

Sandy Telles:

Great. Thanks, Tisha, and thank you all for joining after lunch. Hopefully, you’re caffeinated right, will stay awake. I will work hard to keep it short and hopefully conversational. There’s only a few of us here, which is my perfect presentation, right? Just a few people that work with us and that makes it very comfortable for me. So let’s give it a shot here. So I’m going to walk through the vendor selection process. There’s a couple of different steps that you take. You first start with pre-screening your vendors. And what does that mean? You get information about them. You know, in each slide here, we’re gonna get into a little bit more detail. But most of all, this is just about, Do I want to start with time? Do I want to start with five? You know, who’s out in the industry? Who do I want to work with? Right. The next step is to set your objective. Have an idea of what you want to accomplish. I think that kind of help with any project implementation. You could change it several different times, but at least get a promise of like, I want to start with robotics. How do I do that? The next is you shortlist your vendors. This usually means you go from a group of 10 maybe to a group of five. You go from a group of five maybe to a group of two. You’ve got to make it very meaningful and impactful to you. There are some slides there that can explain some really deep and detailed processes. And you don’t want to do 10 vendors at that time.

Sandy Telles:

So you want to be able to keep it simple and keep it relevant. And lastly, you perform a cost-benefit analysis and this is when you really kind of prove out what it is that you’re trying to accomplish through some different steps, like a cost-benefit analysis. So, pre-screening vendors, we talked a little bit about that and Tisha kind of got us started. Well, how do you pick your vendors? Right. So there are different ways to get introductions. You can attend conferences. You can go and talk to banks. You can talk to peer references and kind of exchange ideas and get a feeling for what they’re trying to solve, what you’re trying to solve. And it gives your creative juices kind of flowing to help you select the vendors that you’ve heard from other people and have been successful. So it’s always good to get references even upfront and saying, hey, have you worked with so-and-so? I mean, I’ve had bankers even ask me, have I worked with this vendor? And how did you feel about it? And that’s just kind of helps you open the doors with different contexts and different connections. But as far as you know, the Internet is here. There’s nothing you can’t find on the Internet. So if you really needed to pick a group of vendors to solve X, say, I wanted to look into money market portals and I know that I use two to three vendors, but maybe there are three other ones out there that I want to kind of match services with. And if I didn’t know if my banks were sharing that information or money providers were sharing that, I’d go to the Internet and do some research. Right. So really research a topic. It kind of helps you pick the vendors that you want to work with.

Sandy Telles:

So next, you set the objective and how do you do this? Hopefully, you kind of have a topic you want to work with. You want to expand the business, you want to expand in a certain service. You know you try to find ideas through your manager, they tell you they want you to do a pilot, which is kind of how we got involved with HighRadius at the beginning. Our management wanted to introduce robotics to finance. It hadn’t been done before. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how to select the vendors. But as I mentioned, there are steps that you can kind of use to help solve that problem. So we had a timeline as well. So I think that kind of helped us work through the objective. So what are you doing? Right. You kind of have to step back and kind of figure out what is the scenario I am trying to accomplish? Who’s involved with the process? Who are my stakeholders? You know, who cares if I get this done or not? How closely are they gonna be monitoring my progress? What’s the technology landscape? You know, you’re working with the tech company. You kind of need to involve IT kind of upfront to figure out and engage in what’s involved and really best in the next level, go into some detail, walk through your goal. So on this slide, we kind of go through the business scenario. So again, Zurich’s a big company. We process over 20000 invoices a month. We wanted to be able to find some automation for electronic receivables. And if you were here at the earlier presentation, this is kind of the prequel of how we got to HighRadius. But we were trying to solve it for you know, we had a great process with the bank. The bank did the key in. We did lockbox services, but we were looking for something more. Right. So we’re really nearing our scope of automation. How do we get that automation and who was impacted by it? Right. We had the brokers, we had all the insureds. We have all segments of the business. We had large companies like Martin McLennan, and so forth that managed and gave us remittance information in a different way. We had our check, you know, customers that really sent checks. We had a process that was working for them. And it was really kind of walking through this and thinking about your objective, you know, how do you further break that down and get rid of the silos? Right. The nature of our business is we receive checks, ACH and wires.

Sandy Telles:

We don’t do a lot of credit cards, at least with our global corporate clients. Everyone’s got a vendor system. That’s kind of how they pay us. You know, you kind of think through as there are some obstacles I need to make sure I address down the road because not everyone’s going to want to change their payment type to kind of match your needs, you know, the goal is to match in the payment with the remittance advice. And then what’s the technology? Am I dealing with one billing system? Do I have bank interfaces? Do I need to provide more infrastructure around maybe files that I got to deliver to a vendor? And what’s that landscape? What’s that going to look like? Again, you’re kind of just feeling out through this process, getting your objective kind of outlined and defined. And then how are you going to measure this? You know, in the end, you want to be able to tell everyone that it was successful, you know, that you actually did succeed with picking the vendor and having automation. So you got to think ahead of time to find out what you are trying to accomplish and how can you prove it right? Or how does a vendor gonna prove it for you? So the end result for us, where we had many, many different benefits, we were really focused on the customer experience. While we did want to save money. One of the attributes, as I said, there’s plenty of benefits, but we really wanted to focus on the customer experience. And that kind of helped us define what the criteria were going to be. So the next step is really shortening your list of vendors, right? It’s important that you had several of them to kind of talk with and socialize the idea along this process and roadmap. You’re probably having demos. You’ve probably already had kickoff meetings. You’ve probably kind of outlined a lot of what you’re going to do with them. But at some point in time in this timeline and again, for every organization, it’s different. This could take six months. You could actually make decisions within four months.

Sandy Telles:

It all depends on you and the commitment to actually getting to the end result, which is not so much taking six months to pick a vendor, but really the implementation step of implementing the vendor. Right. The execution part is really what’s key to making the changes happen. So how long do you want to spend with the vendors is really your decision. But at some point, you move from 10 to 5 or you move from 5 to 3 and you get maybe 2 runners up to kind of figure out who you want to spend the next bit of time with. So here we’re gonna break down and take a poll. I don’t know if any of you have done these steps before, but this is kind of the next meet of selecting a vendor. Have you guys seen these RFI and NDAs and RFPs before, so you guys might have some experience with it? OK. So each one we’re going into a little bit of detail of how it works or what works for you. But again, I’ll just preface that for every organization is going to be different. The complexity of your topic is going to be different. How long you take to make these decisions is going to be different.

Sandy Telles:

So an NDA, I think most of you know what this is, it’s a non-disclosure agreement. Hopefully, your company already has one by now. We have one. I know a lot of times I do this at the very beginning. It kind of help establish a nice relationship with your contact, especially if it’s a new vendor. Sometimes if it’s banks, maybe you feel different because you already have a master agreement that you could work with, you know, make sure that keeps things confidential. But with a new vendor that you’re introducing, you really want to make sure you have a formal agreement that’s in writing that says, hey, you know what, I’m going to protect you and you’re gonna protect us. Right. You’re sharing maybe volume in different statistics that you really don’t need everyone to know about. So in India, it is really important. Obviously, the ideal situation is, if it gets signed immediately, there’s no legal intervention. I know that I’ve had plenty of opportunities where I’ve ever wanted to make changes. And then that could take even a couple of weeks in itself to kind of work through that logistics. Sometimes it’s a red flag because they don’t sign it right away. But if you really like the vendor, you pursue it anyway. Especially if they have a lot of value to the add-in. It just kind of sets the stage for how maybe the contracts are going to go down the road. But again, not a showstopper. You can get through it.

Sandy Telles:

Alright, the RFI means ‘Requests For Information’. It could be formal or informal. Again, it depends if it’s a new vendor or different partners that you’ve already used. You’re introducing a new idea. You want to socialize it. What’s your approach? If it’s usually a partner that you trust and know, you just pretty much have a conversation, right? You get that engagement. You get that connection. You get them to evaluate your idea, write your topic. Make sure it makes sense. If it’s a new vendor, you might feel maybe less, you know, approachable. You might think that maybe socializing it via an email might be sufficient, maybe just to get the topic out there to make sure there’s a good interest this hour. If I know where to find it out on the site, it kind of happens towards any part of the range of the process. So everyone probably does this naturally and doesn’t really call it an RFI. You kind of just engage with the vendor and talk about your ideas. So you can have an open policy or you can just pretty much have it more formalized in an email. But at the end of the day, you want to kind of summarize these findings, writing this kind of helps you short the vendors down the road. You kind of keep it brief and flexible to use for the RFP. So the RFP, request for proposal is on the next couple of slides, they kind of go different ways. HighRadius just kind of explains it. You know, they are very key to the technology. So, you know, the important step here is to include I.T right upfront. In the vendor process, you might even have procurement involved with you here. I think an organization, that’s how we do it. And it depends on the complexity of the project. Right. If it’s worth a lot of money or has a lot of exposure. Right. Everyone’s got their own guidelines for when you involve procurement. So usually an RFP, they get pretty involved because it helps you maintain an objective viewpoint with your vendors. Right. If it’s someone you know or a banker that you already use, it just kind of keeps things really simple. So technology anyways, they get involved. You want them to support your decisions. And so if you include them upfront, it helps get the buy-in. It helps you be prepared down the road for the entire implementation process. So in the end, if you get them involved upfront, understand what the requirements might be at a really high level. Towards the end, you are going to be able to pick your vendor much quicker. You’re gonna be able to talk to management and say, hey, I talked to I.T. They’re also comfortable with the selection process or this group of vendors and you kind of get their buy-in to help support you when you’re ready for the implementation and execution down the road. What else can you consider with the RFP process?

Sandy Telles:

So obviously you’re starting at the bottom. You need to be able to gather the information you’ve collected so far and created some sort of an assessment grid, some sort of requirements to help you further socialize your idea. Right. You’re trying to really pick a vendor, make it as simple and as relevant as you need. I know I’ve seen documents on the Internet that have been pages long. I don’t think I would want to complete the questionnaire either. But the point is, how do you get your information across to that vendor? How do you do so in a concise way? How do you get the information you want to actually make a decision? Because at the end of the day, you’re trying to pick a vendor to make a decision. And there’s people kind of you in the organization to do it efficiently and do it effectively. And while it can take quite a bit of time, I think that you can really get through some steps. If you’ve done it a few times to get some practice, you can really short, you know, cut some steps and really get to the meat of the decisions. So you start at the bottom, take into consideration all the requirements and key features that you want to look at with this vendor. You obviously talk with management, right? They are going to want to see what you’re going to share with the vendors. If you can use excel, you can use a word document. I think there’s a lot of fancy links that you sign, kind of like DocuSign right where you can go to link it that way. And it’s really objective. Usually, procurement will get involved even exchanging this data. So all the questions don’t go directly to you. And at the end of the day, you want to be able to visualize the impact and determine how it best fits your needs. So whatever you provided them, keep it simple, keep it concise because you don’t have to evaluate it. You’re going to have to look at the findings and look at the results and make some decisions. So that’s really, really important.

Sandy Telles:

So here you can kind of visualize the impact, right? You’re kind of starting backward. What am I trying to solve? Well, we wanted automation and we wanted to be able to centralize our receivables. So did the questions I ask to answer that question. Does it ever work for, you know, like a workflow tool? Does it have a module that people can see, what is my need for eliminating repetitive tasks? Well, they have rules. So how do the rules work? Can I do multiple rules? Is it global rules? Does it cost more money to add more rules along the way? I mean, these are some of the things you need to kind of think about even as early on in the vendor selection process because it really helps formulate some decisions that you’re going to make in the execution phase. And that’s what’s really critical to the organization. How else can you do it? You just take a deeper dive again to improve the customer experience. How is that going to happen? Right. Do I have those exceptions? Am I going to be able to apply for the payments on time? What am I trying to solve? And does the vendor do that within the technology that they offer? That’s really the key. You know, automating some reports. Am I going to rely on the bank to give me all these reports? Am I going to rely on the vendor to give me the reports? Do my users need to use two different portals, two different systems? How do I make it easy for them? Right. Does the vendor deliver on some of your objectives? And more importantly, speeding up the process, right. Do I get a dashboard to see all my results? Is I.T. involved in how often do I need to deliver the files? Maybe I was only getting files once a day. Now I’m sending files five times a day in order for them to do their job. That’s all critical information that you kind of need to know about so that when you’re executing it, you feel comfortable with who you chose. And that’s really what this is about.

Sandy Telles:

So to the point, keep it simple. Make sure your document, your requirements are outlined. Make sure you’re achieving the objectives that you want to reach in all the different directions, I.T, customer focus. And that it’s really achieving your goals, which is straight-through processing of electronic payments. So next, you go into a kind of assessment, is it right? Good. I can actually stop. And if anyone’s got any questions. Any questions, or should I just keep going. OK.

Sandy Telles:

A few more slides here. So the RFP. Once you get the results right, you’ve had a lot of discussions. You’ve done a lot of demos. You get a lot of information. You’re feeling very comfortable. You’ve made connections because you’ve been talking to them probably for several months. You’ve probably attended their webinars, done multiple demos with audiences. You’ve included a lot of your peers. In our case, it’s usually Treasury operations. We have the business owners who are actually doing the work and then we have procurement. Right. You have your I.T., everyone’s engaged. Now you’re like, I got all the results. I got all my responses.

Sandy Telles:

What’s my next step? You sit in a room, you talk about it. Right. You got to assess it. What were the responses? How quickly did they respond? Right. Do you want to still measure all of those intangible things? Did they get to me on a timely basis? Did they answer all the questions? Do they have any questions about the topics or the questions you had in your template? And hopefully, if you use a template, the responses are there. The next real step. You can use two different methods. You can either wait for it, which is score one, two, three, or you can just decide yes or no. Do they meet my needs? Right. And here’s an example that we kind of put together, which shows some criteria in some of the features. So if you’re interested, do they have dashboard capabilities? Make sure you include that in your questions. Right. Make sure you ask those questions. And then you rank the vendors at the very end. Well, who did I like more? Who had a better screen? Right. Which gave me the faster information that I needed. Right. How many files do I have to use? Every vendor says the same thing and answers it the same way. Here is where it really gets kind of tricky. You have to really find the outlier, right? You’ve got to find the ones that don’t work. And hopefully, at this point, you’ve made a good decision. You have one or two or maybe you’re already signing with. I really like this group. I think they really meet all of our needs. So some of this sounds like it’s just, you know, everyone does it. Sometimes it’s not outlined in all these steps. But, you know, from the point of the beginning to the end, you pretty much make some decisions all along the way. You know, who feels comfortable with you, who you want to engage in a relationship with. And as you mentioned, relationships are important because you can formulate more opportunities to work with them going forward. So measuring is very important. The next step, which is kind of something you might have done along this step, is really the proof of concept. A lot of vendors don’t do this. I’ve been challenged by some banks. They don’t always have a sandbox where you can actually test information. So you’ve kind of made some assessments. You’re feeling really good. You know what else I really need to make my decision. Well, what if they can test our data? You know, it sounds really cool. Would they be able to test our data and prove that it worked? And since this particular topic is as complex as the idea was several years ago, we were comfortable with the service. We were unfamiliar with the service. And so we asked him, can you demo the service in your test environment? and they did. So it worked with HighRadius, actually, other vendors did the same thing. We were able to take our data, put it into their portal, their sandbox, and we were able to see our information on the screens. So a lot to say that he did that, but they did do that for us. So make sure you ask until they say no. So we were able to track the results.

Sandy Telles:

They were able to visualize our information on the screen. At that point in time, we felt extremely comfortable with who we wanted to go with because we understand how the rules were going to work, how the automation was going to work. We were still ticking in time thinking, alright it’s gonna save this much time. You know, kind of working through the next numbers of how do I prove and how do I show to managers that this is the right organization, this is the right vendor that we wanted to select.

Sandy Telles:

So the next slide kind of tells you again what I just kind of elaborate on. You know, we test the process in the system. It helps you understand what the outputs are gonna be. If you didn’t do it, it’s probably fine. I think if you had a lot of confidence with the vendor, but since they did it for us, we were able to show. All right. We saved even more steps than we thought. We found out that with the other vendor, they used to say, in this example more of a template, a form basis. Then we realized, wait a minute, if we use that basis, then the user is going to have to do three or four more steps after the process is established. So really, the sandbox approach, proof of concept is really the way to go. For us, it helped us really narrow down the two runner ups and really gave us the confidence that we needed and ensured that there were no additional steps added. All right. So reaching towards the end, cost-benefit analysis. I know you guys all know what that means. It’s really just outlining everything that you’ve talked about throughout the entire several months of review. Right. What am I solving for, how do I document that? How is technology impacted, right? What are their costs for all this information? You have to talk to your I.T., right. What’s involved?

Sandy Telles:

I guess they can do like estimates for you to kind of give you an idea of what the cost might be to implement the different files that we need. What are the software costs? And obviously, this is a subscription. So that kind of works a little differently. And then the implementation group. Right. We were listing down all these new key benefits, intangible benefits, just a ton of things out throughout the whole process. So when it came to really do the cost-benefit analysis, you know, we were good at trying to get all of our notes together. We kind of knew how we wanted to get this accomplished. So we wrote down all the vendor stuff, we wrote down all the bank steps. You know, in our particular situation, we have an outsourced group. So we were really keen on making sure that we could easily introduce a new way of applying cash, which is what Tisha was responsible for a new group of people. It’s an offshore vendor. So we were just really mindful that we needed to keep it simple and easy for them to be able to take on the new process and learn the new system. And so we kind of outlined all of the cost savings that we wanted to mention in there.

Sandy Telles:

And again, ongoing costs, there are repetitive costs or set up costs. It looks a little different. You do the ROI and HighRadius does a great job of doing that as well. They kind of tell you if you implemented this service that can kind of give you a real high-level estimate of how much after you will save. And that really helped us give proof to our management. And really, I think that’s yeah, it was great. Here’s again, a real high level. You presented your leadership, you communicated the benefits. Hopefully, you’ve been having conversations with them along the way.

Sandy Telles:

So this really shouldn’t be a big surprise. Maybe they have a couple of questions that you didn’t get addressed. I know that happened to us. A few surprises at the end, but that was good. It kind of kept us on our toes and it helped us really formalize some of the decisions that we hadn’t considered, because there’s always the ground level people, the chiefs, you know, the agent’s kind of doing the change work. And then the management really steps in and gives you a real big picture perspective. And you’re like, oh, so what would that look like? It’s, you know, is the system scalable? How do you introduce each other to business units? Right. I mean, those are the things that the manager thinks about sometimes when you are in the weeks of doing the process. You’re like, oh, yeah, does it work that way? And so we had to go back to the vendor and say, how would you introduce a new business line? You know, we set up all the technology, but in Zurich, everyone uses a different billing system. So how would you introduce a new billing system down the road for, say, Canada or a different group?

Sandy Telles:

So they made it very clear, it’ll be another acronym. And SOW is a statement of work and they kind of explained how that would work. And so in the end, I think that was one of the things that we hadn’t anticipated. But we’re really happy with the ability to be able to grow the business with the vendor that you pick. And so those are important questions at the end that you got to really make sure your vendors get the right financial stability as well. And they’re out in the marketing, you know, how long they’ve been there. So management wants and obviously, Zurich wants to know a little bit more about the vendor besides operationally they can do their work. OK, and with that, I hope that helps you present some ideas on how to choose the vendor and all those issues to come up. And if anyone has any questions. Thank you for letting me get through. That was my first time.

Sandy Telles:

Yes. Well, that’s a good question. I think when we went through the aspect of picking, we did some research upfront. And I think along the way and I think our timeline was almost like six months from the time that we said, hey, we want robotics at the time that we actually kicked off. And then I think vacations, I think holidays kind of get in the way. So along the way, we either didn’t reach out to the vendors or we personally had different holiday schedules. And so I think that kind of delayed some of the momentum. Right. So at the time that we were going, you were kind of fast-paced and moving along. And then there was a period of time. I think it was over a month or more. And so I would definitely work towards looking at everyone’s schedules. And once you formulated a team, which we had done with I.T. as well as ourselves, I think we were not prepared for that.

Tisha Clausell:

And I would just add that, I think that one of the things that actually helped is that HighRadius for example, actually provided people that we can contact. And so originally we were just going on with what we had. But then we decided, OK, let’s contact this person. They say we can contact (inaudible), let’s call (inaudible) and then find out what they can really do. So definitely if they give you their names or somebody you can work with. Definitely go and talk to those people. It definitely helps because of we actually with the other vendor, that was one of our top choices. They actually allowed us to go to their facility and sit with them and they showed us how the system worked. We didn’t get a chance to do that with HighRadius. We did have phone conversations with them. We actually saw them at a conference like this, too, and talked some there, too. So that was really good. Any other questions?

Tisha Clausell:

Sandy is Treasury and I am Finance operations. So we worked together on a lot of our projects. So that’s why we both are here and represented earlier this morning, too. And this particular project with HighRadius was for finance operations. But I worked closely with Sandy. She actually helped me pick the vendor. She actually has a banking relationship with the bank. And so since we are making changes with the bank, she did most of all that stuff. So we actually always have a lot of pride as we work hand-in-hand together. Right. As she’s leading that. I’m leading it. We worked together on most of our projects.

Sandy Telles:

And we were set up in Zurich. So the treasurer kind of supports more of the bank relationships, capital management and investments. And then we have teachers, you know, senior leadership, how he actually handles both the AP department and the AR department. So he has both of those who we work with every day when we do our corporate, you know, all the corporate treasury activities. So we work very closely with our goals and a number of other finance teams.

Tisha Clausell:

You’re welcome. Any other questions? Well, thank you for coming to our presentation. I hope you have a good day.