How Compass Group achieved 85% Auto-Clearing using Highradius Cash Application Cloud

[0:00] Karen Miller:

We would like this to be an interactive session. For us, we’re here to pass along information. So if you have questions, please raise your hand one of the four of us should be able to answer the question. Ideally, we’re here to share our knowledge base. So with that, I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to Peter to talk about the AR landscape.

[0:18] Peter McElearney:

Thank you, Karen. Hi, I’m going to talk first, a little bit about the AR landscape, and also about the three major problems that the landscape provided us before we were before our initial implementation of HighRadius. As Karen mentioned, our corporate offices are in Charlotte, North Carolina. And from those offices, we have a centralized support team that supports all of our units across the states. That team is broken down into two functions, a smaller group of which does payment receipts and the initial application through HighRadius and then that post-processing to get everything loaded to the sub-ledger. And then we have a larger team that works through discrepancies for research and resolution and gets things applied before write off. What’s a little bit non-standard about our team is that we don’t have centralized collections. Traditionally, the field has access to unit systems, what we refer to them as their web-based and that allows them to not only create AR customers and transmit them to our SAP system but create their own invoices and translate those as well. So from the central offices, we provide them with AR aging reporting. And our team of regionals works through liaisons with the field operators, who then work with the customers to resolve discrepancies and get collections completed. A lot of that complexity has to do with some of the issues we saw pre-implementation, just the model that we have. We have a three lockbox configuration with Bank of America in Boston and Chicago and LA that flows into a single BAI2 file from the bank that is then loaded to SAP that represents about 16 of our sectors, which is the lion’s share of our business. That is the activity that we moved into HighRadius in our first implementation in June of 2017. Currently, we have an average of about 38,000 payments a month with a rough mix of 70% check and 30% ACH. But as we all know, everyone’s moving toward electronic payments and ACH. So that we expect to grow and we have to solve for that as we move forward. That is the population actually will see that as we move forward. But that is the population we originally target in our first implementation of HighRadius. Another piece of that landscape, as Karen mentioned, is the growth we’ve seen. We just keep seeing organically and through acquisitions, which has represented on our side a 55% increase in AR receipts since fiscal 2014. She also mentioned the sectorization model. So there’s a lot of complexity in our business. We support business and industry and education, hospitals, support services, and sports, sports venues. Each of those different business lines, each of those has its own complexities in terms of the bills that we create for our clients and the information that comes into us. We also have a decentralized customer master. I mentioned before that the field operators are actually able to create their own customers and send them to our master. And so that’s customer creation. Also, with customer maintenance, there are several entities that have access to the customer master. So we don’t have that centralized kind of data governance team that in the ideal world, everyone should have, right? And the last piece, again, is this ACH population. Pre-implementation, we’re about 20% of that population. It is the smaller piece of our population, but 20% Auto cash is not good. And so that’s what we were getting in our first implementation and we did see results there. But that’s one of the reasons why we were interested in the initial implementation. So having taken a look at the landscape, I just want to go through the three, what we’ve identified is the three major problems that we had to solve for when we first implemented HighRadius. The invoicing inconsistency. As I mentioned, our in-unit systems allow operators across the country to transmit invoices directly to our sub-ledger. The systems are not because of the complexity of the business, always standardized. So we had invoice numbering ranges different, between different sectors, and in some cases, we even had invoice numbers being handed to the client that were different than the invoice numbers that are loaded to our sub-ledger. So we have a solution for that as well. Payment types, we accept all forms of tender. Each one has its own issues in terms of being able to auto cash and building logic into identity remittance information and auto cash and SAP.

[5:02] Peter McElearney:

And again, the customer Master, we keep going back to this, it’s probably one of our biggest lessons learned in the original implementation is that HighRadius is very powerful. There’s a logical logic there and it does get a lot done for you. But it is all based on the integrity of your data. That’s the first and foremost lesson, at least for myself, that’s one of the biggest lessons we learned. So to the customer, master, and integrity, again, no centralized data governance, we have people submitting to the customer master with the volume and growth that we have too many customer master records in our customer. So right now.

[5:47] Peter McElearney:

And again, sorry, customers are good. Yes, yes, always good, but too many right now. And we’ll see that when I get to this next point here. In your company code changes, because of the client and statutory reporting, we have a large number of company codes that we have set up in SAP. And the way our system is configured a customer lives within a single company code. We’re often realigning business across these company codes, which means we then have to pick up the AR activity and move it between company codes as well. During that process, we leave a legacy customer in the old company code, which then complicates our master. And then we have duplicates, and we have other issues just because of that. So it’s another issue where the master kind of gets out of our hands. And finally, our instance of SAP is very mature. We implemented it in 1999. And over those 20 plus years, we have instituted any number of workarounds or solutions for individual problems, which then became this weird mosaic of back end processes that we at times may not have even been aware of, documentation wasn’t correct. And we saw that when we started working with HighRadius things were happening that we didn’t understand. And we really then had to dig in and find out the back end infrastructure of those jobs.

[7:13] Peter McElearney:

Again, the ACH remittance, the 20% Auto cash rate of that popular that smaller population that was submitting an ACH is or less than half, were actually using that CTX format, with the agenda records that really kind of clean remittance that really lends itself to auto cash. The majority of our remittance was coming in through email, which created a disconnect between the folks who were working in SAP and the research that they were doing. So they were in SAP looking at an item to be processed, but then would have to go to an email box and sort of research through the email box and see what they thought might be the correct remittance, and kind of work through that which is very inefficient, right? And then finally, formatting inconsistency In the remittances that we were receiving, and that had to kind of levels to it, the first being that the attachments that we were receiving from our clients were in varied multiple formats, PDF, Excel, any number of files that they were providing to us. And then formatting inconsistency is between the remittance advice, even the bank remittance advice on the ACH, which had different templates, so for example, the invoice appears differently. And you have to set up multiple templates to be able to find and identify correctly, the invoice number, the customer number, the vital statistics. So that’s what we faced pre-implementation. And now Christie is going to let her talk to us about the solutions, some of these problems when we implemented HighRadius.

[8:49] Christie Mosley:

Absolutely, yeah, as Peter and really our biggest issue was this ACH of 20%. If you think about it, that’s 30% of our entire population that is eight to 10 thousand payments a month that we are not really capturing a lot of remittances, right? So what we really wanted to do was use HighRadius for that main purpose originally thinking, we’d like to call it the false start, right? So you think about this one thing and HighRadius did an amazing job of going in to, you know, those portals, the email inbox and things like that, putting them all together, and HighRadius enhancing that data and then sending it into SAP auto caching a lot better. So we actually got up to a 60% overall auto cash rate from this. I think we are around 50 or 45, somewhere right around there. 43-45 and, yeah, 60% is a big deal, but we did kind of like plateau out. Not really a good thing, right. So, yeah, so we then decided to come to Radiance. And this was last year, actually, we came, Karen and I came to Radiance. And we’re just like blown away with my gosh, there’s so much more we could be doing. Yeah, it was, I can’t even say enough. We were so enlightened by this entire thing. So yeah, we went into what we call pre Exception Handling world, and things like that. So I’ll cover that in a minute. And so we had six major challenges with just the out of the box, a call out of the box meeting, our team wasn’t actually in HighRadius working per se, all systematic, just feeding in whatever came in and hoping that it, you know, just threw into the moon, right. So we still had ACH issues. I mean, we captured a lot. However, it’s just not enough. Right, Erica? Yeah.

[10:48] Erica Peters:

One of the biggest issues like Christie said was the fact that customers were remitting details, however, inconsistencies were across the board, whether it came down to formatting whether they sent in PDF, embedded an actual image into the email. In some cases, they would send an Excel and CTX formatting. So when it came time to load in the system, you know, kind of just spit out because the system didn’t know what to do at that point because there was, you know, that inconsistency there. But at the end of the day, you know, we got it to a point where the customer would then we’d work with the client to start to remember remitting better information and kind of overcame that challenge.

[11:30] Christie Mosley:

Right? Yeah. And also, we couldn’t really track down those issues per se. SAP doesn’t have a lot of reporting capabilities to say, hey, this person didn’t put in the right invoice. You know, it just feeds in and, you know, garbage in garbage out. Right. So I mean, basically with no metrics whatsoever of reporting things like that. The customer master we had, we didn’t do anything about it at that point. It was still just a hot mess. You know, it’s all over the place we had, we didn’t even know where to start with that customer master. And just getting somebody on board or somebody dedicated I guess is the best way to say it with all of these issues, they take up a lot of time to just even digest and try to figure out from this standpoint, right, Karen?

[12:24] Karen Miller:

I think that all of those things on this slide kind of come together into the product ownership because if you have a person who is dedicated to focusing on these areas, instead of trying to solve for the world, you know, you have somebody who’s looking into the remittance, you can focus on those customers you can get reach out to them and get the right information. And then somebody who’s really digging into your customer master to understand where the complexities are and what can be systematically changed so that they can make HighRadius work more efficiently. I mean, there is power in there. We really needed to pull back and have a person pull away from their day job and live really focused on this to make this happen. And I think you’ll see later down the line, it proved itself out it was a really crucial part of the puzzle for us.

[13:11] Peter McElearney:

And Krista, you touched on it briefly, this pre except what we’re calling pre Exception Handling was, we had implemented HighRadius, and we had seen an increase in our auto cash rate we had prior to HighRadius jobs, SAP jobs automated, that was running overnight with logic for auto cash. And we were asked about exception handling. But the timing was such that we were receiving a file from Bank of America at six or seven o’clock at night, and the jobs kicked off at nine. And at the time, we thought, we’re going to continue to do the SAP process and then we will work through hiring SAP with the information that is coming in. So we were taking advantage of the rules processing that we had set up that we had implemented at HighRadius, but we weren’t taking advantage of being in HighRadius is to do exception handling, doing your actual Exception Handling in HighRadius before you fed it back to SAP. So it was kind of counterintuitive to us, we built in a days delay actually, right. So we receive our data on Monday evening, for example, and we don’t load it until Tuesday. So that gives our group a day to do all their Exception Handling in HighRadius, which, again, is counterintuitive. But what we found was building a days delay has actually reduced the number of days it takes us to do this by taking advantage of exception handling and reaching an 85% Auto cash rate for the stuff that’s coming into SAP, and then there’s a lot less to have to work through.

[14:37] Karen Miller:

Well, I think part of that too, was it wasn’t really a shift. So those same people were working in SAP doing the exceptions, they weren’t doing it in HighRadius. So when we moved people into HighRadius to work, it, It wasn’t additional people, but we could take advantage of the AI functionality as well because the system is starting to learn what we’re doing when we’re doing It outside the box in SAP, there we’re losing the power of HighRadius.

[15:06] Christie Mosley:

So yeah, where we came definitely comes back to that whole siloed approach, where we think this is how we have to continue doing everything day in and day out. But we want to try it like, Oh my gosh, or ACH we need help there and not really thinking about that whole big picture, per se. So, as I mentioned, we did go to Radiance last year, and we’re just, oh my gosh, you know, like, let’s, let’s do this. And so we did implement back June of last year and have not, you know, like it’s, it’s overwhelming. I mean, everybody’s like we are at what number now, and things like that. It’s crazy. Yeah, definitely. So what waste basically what the pre Exception Handling part or post exception here heals is what we call it now, right? Going into HighRadius and actually working the payments, or helping the system, learn. That’s what it is really, that’s what it comes down to, is we are not only just letting Heidi’s do stuff, we’re teaching it to do stuff. So, you know, we had two people on our team who did nothing but help assemble these pages for our team dork. Okay, going in an email inbox, attaching it somewhere, letting everybody else apply it. Okay, two people. All right now our cash team actually owns that process. We don’t have a dedicated support team just for that. Okay. I can’t say enough about this. I’m a big supporter of really good customer master’s recommendations. So there is actually a report. It’s called a recommendation review. It takes everything that’s being applied, things like that and says, maybe you should maintain this here and It just prints out it gives you a nice little spreadsheet. And you say, yeah, that that works for me or no, let’s not do that, you know? And then we can now track down client errors a little bit better.

[17:14] Christie Mosley:

And we can. What’s it called? Just scribble right? Scribble on a check, Here’s your money, have fun.

[17:22] Christie Mosley:

We can actually try and read that better than, you know, a bank or scanning process would be able to and enhance it that way. So our cash team does that process as well. We do face challenges every day, right? So really, it was just starting and identifying, but we now know instead of just the silo, we’re not looking at that whole big picture of how can we get the biggest bang for our buck across it instead of just AC ages or things like that.

[17:54] Christie Mosley:

So we’re constantly getting new customers who don’t want new customers.

[18:00] Christie Mosley:

You know, and then new customers, they don’t always send in your minutes, right? They don’t know where to start. So you get a new customer and they send you a payment, have fun once again. So I will always be a challenge unless we come up with a better solution, right? data processing. So basically, as Peter mentioned, the was at nine o’clock timeframe, no time to work it, we actually had them hold that file a day. So we could actually come in in the daytime and not work overnight, and apply for those payments or correct those payments, I should say. And just getting used to that. Once again, that’s a siloed approach. Coming at it as an open-minded person, you kind of have to be flexible in that. So just a couple of them shouldn’t say a couple. So the solutions hi radius has actually worked us through is a dedicated support system, okay? There’s a ticketing system that you go with too, they have just people who know your instance, we have so many customizations in there just attack all the stuff that we have going on. They know not only just out of the box stuff, but they can also like jump on a call and say, Hey, this is, you know, we suggest you do this. And it’s not only that it’s kind of partnering, but we can also ask them, you know, what are your other clients suggesting? Or what do you kind of suggest based on your other clients and stuff like that getting those best practices is the best way to put that? We’re always looking to the future. So exploring new options with hi radius. We want to figure out a way to track down remittances that are, you know, customers that are on all always are not always I shouldn’t be that negative right. Sending in bad remittance or the wrong remittance, no remittance things like that, figuring out a way to tag those flags and for us, and then we can start tackling those and then EFT onboarding. So new customers, no remittance finding a solution for that. It’s very time-consuming at this point just to have somebody dedicated to sharing our EFT information with everybody. And then understanding that data processing time, we got the two to the two large, excuse me, the one day delay, however, they have this thing that’s called a holiday schedule. So let’s say or we take a vacation. And like the whole team is out. And we can say, you know what, let’s not send that file over because nobody’s going to be there to work it. Okay, we can hold that file the next day when they actually do come in and work. Hello. Can you hear me? Okay? Yeah. So we can basically enhance all of that once we get back into the office without feeding in bad data and things like that. All right. So not only is it about you know, the stats and making sure we’re getting in the right places. We don’t want it to have a negative impact on our group or our cash app team. So just to give you a little bit of information, chaos, right, that’s where we were before. HighRadius with our cash app team. Think about the little hamster on the wheel, constantly doing the same process, right day in, day out. That’s where we were not making any progress. And I mean, Erica can really talk about this, you know,

[21:25] Erica Peters:

As Christy and Peter mentioned earlier, so our group is composed of our cash app associates, as well as a set of regionals who handle more so like the research after the cash app piece, but they were actually their work. They were brought on to help us out with our day to day cash app, just to kind of keep up with the volume, because of those redundancies and consistencies to try to meet. The SLA is we had in place at the time, we were taking them away from their day to day tasks. So that’s how it kind of was beforehand and afterward After post-implementation, sorry, we were able to kind of take, get them back to what their normal day to day was more value-added work. And just less dependability on them. And just better use our cash app team, and have them focus on what they’re actually, you know, there to do every day.

[22:22] Karen Miller:

So for me personally, you know, I don’t want to de-emphasize that, but a lot of it too is the development of the associates. So, you know, when you’re sitting there, as Christie said, doing running on the wheel, doing the same thing over and over and over again, you’re not teaching your people new skill sets, you’re not preparing them for the future. They’re not developing, they’re not feeling fulfilled at the end of the day, right. So as we were able to evolve this into the exception handling, people are learning new skills, they’re learning new things, and they’re also coming out with new ways to do things. So it’s really helping our team grow and become more fulfilled and feel good at the end of the day. Not Just like I went in there, and I knocked out this many, and now I’m done, and I’m going home, right? There’s more to it. So developing the associates is a big part of it. For me, I think that’s been unbelievably important to the team and the culture on the team.

[23:15] Peter McElearney:

There’s a mention there about more strategic work. The combination of implementing HighRadius and having a product manager or someone dedicated to the use of the product took us from a line item level on both teams, the cash app folks and the regionals that we’re researching, we’re actually kind of thinking of it as individual line items that needed to be handled. While not losing focus on the individual line items, we’re now able to see our entire AR aging, look for drivers of issues and work on it with the data that we’re getting from my radius. But we now have that two-pronged approach, right, it’s not just to Karen’s point, getting through the day and getting as many as we can be done. We’re also looking forward to how we can improve the entire AR master while the folks are still looking at the line. Well,

[24:01] Christie Mosley:

I would like to reiterate to you it’s a faster process as, as Erica mentioned, it’s a little more straightforward. But remember, it’s also learning that stuff. So instead of, you know, Sally coming in every day and saying this is I know this customer, they don’t do the right thing. I’m always going to have to correct it, we can actually start getting that information into HighRadius. And it’s going to learn like, Hmm, okay, you put in this, maybe it actually is this and suggesting things along that way. It’s pretty nice. Yeah. So let’s get to the nitty-gritty, right? We want some results.

[24:37] Erica Peters:

Right, good stuff. My favorite slide.

[24:41]Erica Peters:

So with all that being said, talk about the actual results that came about due to the post and post Exception Handling project. So the team like I mentioned, they start their day now actually in HighRadius, and so say they’re in there for about four hours completing their cash app process. And actually, it actually takes them less time to complete cash apps on the front end and the high res portal because of the cleaner customer master data that’s being fed in, you know, there’s less clicks, which allows them to then transition into our era p system, which is SAP at the end of their day, and kind of close out their day there. So the stuff that feeds into SAP is like stuff, items that need a journal entry, that require more research that needs to be done on the sap side. For the more complex customer. Also, of course, the Big D, they are the biggest, I guess, is that 85% application rate is amazing from the 60. We’re 6064 where we plateaued, we’re now at 85% overall automation. And as we mentioned previously can’t stress this enough and now allows our team to be more, you know, useful. In other areas more value-added work. And so they’re just building good morale for the team overall. And I said that comes with increased efficiency. And we did all of that without having to increase headcount, which was amazing. With that, I’d like to talk about some of the best practices to help you implement if you do decide to go the radius route. One of the biggest things that we learned in the process is invoice formatting. If you are able to work with your client ahead of time and be proactive, and kind of, you know, have those meetings with them, that will allow you to like say, Hey, this is how your format in your head this is how you’re currently submitting your invoices. Here’s, you know, we’re potentially going to live with this product. Are you able to modify your invoicing or you better improve how your invoices are illustrated on your romance currently, I think being proactive with them in turn, you know, increase your auto cash rate on the back end? And then Peter is going to talk for actually sorry, Chris is going to talk more about one.

[27:09] Christie Mosley:

So I’m going to harp on the customer master again, clean in, clean out, right? So just understanding all those little bits and pieces that you may have in your coaster manner, Master how they impact things like AutoCAD, or auto clearing things of that sort. I mean, just understanding that it’s not just a piece of information out there, and it just sits there for nobody to look at. We can actually use that data. And so if you can keep it clean, you can keep it archived, all those great things. I can’t even Yeah, it’s a big deal.

[27:44] Karen Miller:

And I think part of that, too, is understanding your customer master before going in as Peter talked about earlier, there were some things that were happening in our system. And if you can’t have it clean, at least know what’s going on in there. The thing that I advocate the most is having a dedicated Product Manager is really good. It really has made the difference over the past year for us. I mean, jumping 20% is enormous and a year for our cash application, especially if you really went out and did the numbers, we get about 38,000 payments a month. It’s just it has been phenomenal for us. So I would really recommend it. First and foremost making sure you have a person or a team dedicated to really be the subject matter expert with HighRadius and be able to talk to their people at HighRadius. That’s my biggest part.

[28:50] Peter McElearney:

And finally, it can’t be overstated. Partnering with HighRadius during implementation and beyond. So we had two stages we implemented kind of out of the box. And then realized later that we had to take advantage of exception handling and kind of had to step back that first year and a half or two that we were alive, we tried to solve all our problems, and we didn’t reach out and ask and get that relationship built. And when we approached them last year, they were very open to it, not only with that dedicated support team that understands our instance of HighRadius but also with that, the implementation of accepting exception handling and it took us a minute to figure out the logic and the architecture and the timing that they were with us all the way. Yeah.

[29:35] Christie Mosley:

So now we hit you with a lot of information, right? So has anybody got any questions?

[29:48]Audience:

You give us some. You hear me on the microphone. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Hello, maybe? Whoo. Here we go.

[30:11] Peter McElearney:

I can’t see her.

[30:12]Audience:

You give us some specifics on what you mean by cleaning up the customer master. So is it things like Parent-Child relationships? Is it? They’re missing a payer ID or an address? Could you give us some specifics? Yeah.

[30:26] Christie Mosley:

We actually had parent-child relationships that we actually didn’t maintain. Originally, we went through a process of linking all of those payers as one payer bunch of customers altogether, and I think they call it the old payer relationship in the HighRadius world. That was a big part of us. We mentioned the systematic band-aids that we kind of had in place. So one of them was like a maker writing program. So making sure if it’s not a valid maker, or maybe it doesn’t actually belong to that customer. It doesn’t need to be there. Those are our biggest two points on just how HighRadius has been using that customer master-detail.

[31:10] Karen Miller:

And the others.

[31:13] Peter McElearney:

Sorry, real quick, do we have the right mix in the audience? Are there a lot of people who are thinking of HighRadius and some people who already have HighRadius. And so people have been living as a good mix. So some people might be familiar with the concept of an all-payer in a radius, some might not. In our customer Master, we would receive one of our back end Jobs to apply a mechanic to a customer every time we put an application on that customer. So with our cross-sector business, we had a lot of folks, a lot of makers being written to multiple customers. So we ended up with duplicates. That kind of defeats the logic of how radius right it’s not going to make a duplicate decision for you. So to use the old payer, we created one overarching customer and took all of that information from each of the individual customers. in that relationship, but it all up on that one all payer and that allowed us to kind of group all those customers into a single customer for the purposes of remittance.

[32:11] Peter McElearney:

Oh, sorry.

[32:14]Audience:

Um, so I guess that you’re talking about the alternate and payer, and what do you handle like bank checks then where they all share one maker, but they’re all separate customers?

[32:24] Christie Mosley:

Yes. Do you have any other way of doing that? It’s not just solely based on the maker as your application? There’s this thing that is called a pair name, I believe is what it’s called, where it’s not necessarily the maker or the bank information off of that check. It’s the name on the check. So let’s say it all comes from, you know, payment processing center. If it says, go here, and Joe Schmo over here. You can actually map those instead of that maker information and just don’t even maintain that maker anywhere on a customer.

[33:03] Audience:

Yeah. And then the second question was, you talked about recommendation reviews that HighRadius does so for the handwritten checks, to my understanding, HighRadius only reads the face of the check. So if a customer hand-writes a check, and also lists their invoice on the face of the check, how is it handled?

[33:19]Karen Miller:

I don’t think that we really deal with that very often because we’re not B to C, where we are more B2B. So we don’t get a lot of handwritten checks.

[33:28]Christie Mosley:

Yeah, but we also we’re not actually using HighRadius for their tech scanning process. Right now. We are still currently using our bank. Who does that keying and scanning and all of that for us?

[33:42]Announcer:

Right. You had a question or two for one to ask?

[33:53]Announcer:

All right. Okay, perfect. So thank you guys so much. I’m going to get too close to the speaker and it’s going to feel like I am screaming. Thank you guys so much for joining us and being amazing and awesome so a round of applause for them.