Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 1:55
Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. The session will get started momentarily. Thank you for joining us today. Your session will begin shortly.
Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Your session will begin shortly. Hi everybody, and welcome to Shared Services tech 2021. Thank you for joining the session. My name is Marisol Hernandez, and I will be your facilitator. All participants will be on mute. So if you have a question, please enter it in the q&a section below your attendee screen. The recording of today’s session will be available by the end of the day. If you want a PDF of the presentation right away. Please visit the Shared Services tech LinkedIn page linked in the details in the details section. Also, we greatly appreciate it if you take some time to leave a review and share your feedback on the session. To do so, please click rate the session or the hearts above the video player. That being said, we now Welcome everyone to the discussion, ‘How a digital shift created savings, improved customer experience, and agility benefits for Bayer’ presented by Maria Luisa Mancha, global process owner and the accounts receivable for Bayer, and Martin Doran accounts receivable Process Manager, Bayer. Maria has over 13 years of experience across finance and accounting, shared service center organization, global order to cash, and global project management in financial banking and life science industries. Martin has been with Bayer for the last 12 years and is responsible for supporting accounts receivable on a global level with end-to-end process ownership within the order to cash organization. To begin, we will start with a short poll question. The poll question that you will see launch on your screen now. Where are you in your AR recovery and growth journey? A.) Is still very much impacted by the crisis. B.) We’re stable now, taking one day at a time. C.) We are stable but not concerned about a second wave. D.) We have fully recovered and are now focused on our agenda. We encourage everyone to please submit their responses. I will give you 30 seconds, and then I will hand it over to Maria Luisa.
Maria Lu, before I close out the poll, do you have any feedback? What do you think the results will be?
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 6:55
I’m curious about the result. I’m not participating. I want to be the spectator on this one.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 7:02
Want to remain unbiased. What about you, Martin? How do you feel the results will be?
Martin Doran(Speaker II) 7:07
Yeah, it’s a bit like your vision. So I think we have a clear winner here.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 7:12
Great, so I’ll give everybody just 10 more seconds, and I will close the poll out. Just a few more responses, Great.
Seeing a lot of you participating, thank you very much. All right, so I’m going to close out the quiz now.
Great, and then we will share the results at the end. I will now hand it over to Maria Lu. Maria Lu, the floor is all yours.
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 7:57
Thank you very much, Marisol, for the introduction. So welcome, everybody. Good morning and good afternoon. In today’s presentation, we will be giving an update on our experience within Bayer implementing Highradius solutions across more than 60 countries. What we would like to share with you is our experience and highlight what worked well for us and for sure, we also wanted to share what we think is important for those ones that have already started the journey or are already part of the journey. To make the most of the time, we will focus on that top-line story and the key lesson learned. But before we begin, allow me to spend some few words about our company. Bayer is a life science company with over 150 years of history and with a presence in more than 80 countries and across four main regions. So maybe the first question would be, why did Buyer embark on this journey in the first place? What we were looking for was what we were trying to fix with this, so within our order to cash organization, our goal to deliver Bayer’s purpose, Science for a better life, is about winning with our customers, consumers, and patience and for that, we have identified four key pillars, one of which is service excellence. So Bayer focuses on investing in technology to drive automation in this. Of course, leveraging new tools but also make the most of the existing assets that we have like EDI, customer portals, OCR, and one of the early wins for this goal was to embark on the cash application transformation journey for us would be to provide a solid foundation for the other processes. For other than innovation down the line, leveraging Highradius cash application tool for us was the first step on this digital journey. But before we go through the details of our experience, maybe we can share some thoughts and some key achievements up to today. So we are currently processing more than 900k payments per year, we have connected three ERP systems with Highradius, and we have achieved more than 85% Global automation in the Cash app; and we also have implemented the tool across more than 60 countries. So here you see a graphical summary of our journey played out. So we started back in 2017, with our pilot that was Australia but went flagged in 2019. In 2018, we add additional three waves comprising 12 countries. But then you can see that it is 2019, where all the things came together, and we learn from our experience. So we were able to move from 12 countries to 51, and we will be giving you more details during the presentation about all these roadmaps. So we will try to condense our three years journey in 20 minutes, and for that, we decided to simplify our experience in the following section. So we will be talking about preparation kickoff, implementation, result, and key takeaways. So for us, at the beginning of the project, the goal was already clear. So we wanted to have a global solution implemented across all countries, we wanted to increase our automation rate to be the best in class, and we wanted to achieve our expected benefits and savings. Our first section will be about preparation and kickoff. We will touch together with the topic of the data preparation, the country scope, timeline, and the global standard versus Highradius functionalities.
Okay, back in 2017, at the beginning of the project, we had two main deliverables. We wanted to focus on two main deliverables: the baseline and the business case preparation. In terms of the baseline, I think it was very important for us to identify the FTEs dedicated to the cash app. Why? Because in accounts receivable, you don’t have only cash applications. You have other activities like value adjustment or top opinion activities. But for us, it was important to identify the ones really impacted by the cash app or dedicated to the cash app and then, the existing automation was the base. Once we identify the baseline, then we sit together with the Highradius colleagues to prepare the business case. So we worked together to estimate the expected automation increase, as well as we wanted to assess the workload for handling remittance. Why we choose, in several countries we still had a long process, let’s say not an efficient process. Where customers were sending the remittance to the credit manager, credit manager to accounts receivable, and accounts receivable hopefully to Highradius, so it’s a too long process. So we wanted to move from this to many stakeholders to have directly the customers sending the remittance to Highradius and then save a lot of time between. So both of them were very important points that we wanted to consider in our business case. So in this part of the preparation for us, the key lesson learned or what we would like to share with you or recommend is to make sure that you have the payment folders and those who are split by payment methods. Why? Because you should be able to identify which payment methods should be excluded from Highradius. For instance, if we think about Europe, direct debit should not be part of Highradius because only than you have the clear automation rate or you can really plan what is the real automation due to the implementation of Highradius and the most important thing is that even though you have prepared the business case, challenge yourself, challenge your estimation, makes sure that what you have estimated is realistic and is achievable to avoid surprises down the road. Sometimes it’s better to be a bit more conservative on that one. Okay, once we added the business case prepared, then we were focused on the country scope and the timeline. With regards to the scope for us, the decision was easy to clear since the beginning; we wanted to implement Highradius in all countries served by the shared services center organization and now that we make the company with plans. So, first of all, we have identified a pilot and what were the criteria? So for us, it was important to have a pilot where different conditions are present right. In our case, it was Australia; we chose Australia because there were significant opportunities for automation increase. Australia has diverse customer segmentation and also different payment methods. On top of that, there were also remittances available. So for us, it was basically low automation, low risk, but high potential for improvement. So once we identify the pilot, then we also sit together to decide okay. Now we will plan our wave sequence. So we try to balance the waves in terms of time zone, in terms of implementing the cash app. So we had to look at the current automation of those countries and the impact on global automation and very important for us is to check and make sure that we had a clear overview of the interdependencies with other projects. Why because in order to cash organization, we didn’t want to touch the country several times with different initiatives. So all these factors, we took into consideration to decide the way to approach. In this path for us, what was very important on what we would recommend to the others is up to the colleagues here in the call is to have a big bank approach. In our case, it works really well. Why? Because we chose to reduce the implementation cost and we add early savings and benefits, that is another point to highlight, and we will guide you through, a bit later about it and also focus on key countries. But because if you do a big bank approach, you will not be able to implement absolutely everything in all the countries, you will not have that much time. So you need to focus on key countries for each wave.
Now once you have the business case, and you have the country scopes and the timeline, then you move at, with all the details, right? So we were lucky that in Bayer, we have a very strong global standard. What we did was a pre-study where operation insurance of the center collected all the information with relation to their conferencing scope, and the scope of this was based on a questionnaire where we wanted to understand if there were any country requirements or deviation from our standard that we should be considering in our implementation phase. After that, we did the physical workshop, where we had a high-level review of all the countries and all the gaps. We set it together with the Highradius IT and shared services center organization. When analyzing, to review all the countries in terms of system settings, remittance availability, format, and any legal requirements. So every information that would outpass to smooth implementation. Once we did that, then we tried to understand the Highradius functionality. We compare with our standard because we wanted to understand if Highradius was able to automate our requirements. Once we had all this understanding of country requirements and the gap, Bayer’s standards from Highradius weren’t different; we agreed together on a list of the most important points that make sure you have a clear list of requirements in the beginning. But here, I know I’m focusing very much on the tool. But we all know that the tool is just a part of the success of a project. What helped us was the collaboration of all the colleagues. The shared services center colleagues helped us very much in the work part of the journey. So we should not forget that at the end, people are the main component in such implementation. Okay, so now I will hand it over to Martin that will guide you through the next project phases.
Martin Doran(Speaker II) 19:00
Great. Thanks, Maria Lu, and Hello all. So I will now focus on the implementation phase and here, I’ll speak about the real implementation, how we undertook country deep dives, how we adopted continuous improvements and our implementation approach. So after having a country high-level overview, we use the Big Bang approach for implementation. That meant going live with many countries per wave and as there was not enough time to deep dive into each and every country, we went with the deep dive for just selected key countries, as mentioned by Maria Lu, and that was per wave. How did we choose the key countries? We looked at, and they were chosen based on volumes of incoming customer payments. So higher volume equaling more weight, more impact for the global automation rates, we looked at FTE impact. So, which was key to delivering success in terms of efficiency. We looked at existing high automation countries where we needed to at least maintain existing high automation and not fall backward and lastly, we looked at legal requirements. The outcomes of those deep dives were very important, as they gave us the simulation results for automation. So we knew what to expect and they helped us decide what were the key functionalities that were necessary and were required for go-live versus those functionalities that were perhaps nice to have for continuous improvements or for later waves. The timeline per wave was quite short. So three months implementation plus one-month hyper care and as a result, we were not able to implement all enhancements or all functionalities. That’s why for us, it was important to have one central enhancement list for all waves, to monitor, follow up, and to decide the criticality and priority based on our learning curve. We were learning as we went along; we had one team working on both the project implementation and the continuous improvement enhancements and that meant that the team worked from the central lists of enhancements, which were maintained across all waves. So the list was visible to all stakeholders. That means including operations, the project team at Bayer, the project team at Highradius, and the global process owner and each item on the list. So enhancements and requirements were continuously reviewed for the benefit versus the costs in order to have a clearly aligned picture of which enhancements were required. In which sequence and when they were needed. Yeah. So as the waves were short, the enhancements were split between those that were must-haves and for go live, or other requirements needed either for later waves or before project closure and quick wins that could be resolved by our key users or supporters. So now I’ll speak about the results phase. I’ll speak on the closure deliverables, optimization, and continuous improvements. So approaching the end of the project, we discussed the project’s results and identified further optimizations needed to fully deliver the original targets and establish a working model for continuous improvements. Every project is a journey. So even if you officially closed the project, it doesn’t mean that everything possible has been fully implemented. Yeah. For us, it was important to have a clear picture of what was the status regarding what has been achieved and for us, that meant automation was increased globally by 13%. The workload in the cash app was reduced by 60% and we implemented many enhancements. However, there were still opportunities for improvements, with some existing enhancements in progress or others on hold.
That was the main reason that we created a task force to run over one additional year after the project closure and with the aim to further optimize and go beyond the original targets. As a result of that task force, we increased global automation by a further 3% and for specific countries with high automation, we, in some cases, increased from 80% to 95, and in other cases, we went from low automation 0% all the way up to 90 and what helped during the task force and now during everyday continuous improvements was the design and creation of tailored reports and they gave us visibility on opportunities for improvements. So that included dashboards, which provide a high-level information overview of KPI performances, and reports that allow users to drill down into detailed information and make informed decisions about what are the next steps and what are the opportunities for continuous improvements. Lastly, I will speak on our key takeaways. So summarizing our key takeaways. important for us was a strong global standard. It was the basis for successful global implementation, secure early stakeholder buying from operations and local organizations. So use your pilots to use your communication, show the benefits of the tool and undertaking the design workshop. It gives you a high-level overview of all countries in scope, and it gives you the visibility of the requirements and then using the deep dive to go into the detailed analysis for key countries where you need to win. The Big Bang approach for us accelerated our savings. It helped us reduce internal implementation costs. So it was really a success and part of that was using dashboards and reports for consistent performance monitoring to drive continuous improvements and support operational excellence and lastly, visibility of pain points. If we have one key takeaway from this, it’s that dashboard, if available earlier in the project, would help us to focus improvements and enhancements, or maximum benefit can be achieved. So with that, we arrived at the end of the presentation. Thank you very much for your attention and I’ll hand it over to Marisol for any questions.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 26:17
Hello, everyone. So now we will open up the q&a section with another poll question. It will be launching on your screen now. Thank you, Martin and Maria Lu, for the presentation. Before we take the question because I did see some comments from the audience. I would just like for everybody to, you know, give us your feedback quickly and tell us how important is your order to cash in your digital transformation journey in 2021. Like I said, this will help everyone who is attending; we can bounce feedback from one another. So I’ll just give you guys another 30 seconds to answer the poll question that you see on your screen and we will kick off the questions portion. If you have any questions for either Maria Lo or Martin, please feel free to drop it in the question chat under your video screen and we will get those answered for you right away. Okay, so 10 seconds, everyone. I’m closing out the quiz now. Thank you for your feedback. Maria Lu and Martin, I will share with you the questions that we got from the audience. So the first one is what ERP is Bayer US utilizing? And is Highradius aligned functionally with it?
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 27:52
I can take this one and then Martin, if you want to add more, please feel free. So in the case of the US, the European system where we implemented Highradius were mainly PVC and P2R. But if I take this question more in a general way, we didn’t have any issue with any of our ERP systems connected to Highradius. I think for us, the challenge was more to have one standard through all the ERP systems that we have in Bayer, but with Highradius, we didn’t have any issue with the connection or up-down.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 28:28
Martin, do you have any feedback where you would like to add?
Martin Doran(Speaker II) 28:32
Yeah, just add to that. So the ERP system wasn’t a challenge. Basically, whatever ERP we need to connect Highradius was possible to do so. Like Maria Lu mentioned, it’s just really having the standards or looking at the country specifics. That was the only challenge.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 28:50
So now the next question that we got from the audience was, what were some of the challenges of agreeing on global standards if you have any examples that you can provide?
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 29:00
Okay, so as I mentioned during the presentation, in our case, we were pretty much lucky to have a very strong global standard in Paris. Nevertheless, we went through the deep dive and the company discussion. We realized that there were some alignments that need to take place again; I can give you an example about cleaning rules. So in Bayer, we had implemented a set of cleaning rules that our colleagues in the shared service center were applying manually and when we went to a reduce, we realized we were too conservative with the cleaning rule. So we said okay, and it is able to be flexible. I can tell Highradius include this. So we had a little bit, and we were much more flexible thanks to the tool. So we had to come back to all the counters during the kickoff and try to explain to them the benefits and get their buying and because you know people sometimes are scared about technology and digitalization, so For us, it was a big challenge to convince them about the benefits, but clearing rule was a clear example of challenges tolerance in the system because colleagues in the countries and it seems to be pretty much conservative with the tolerances, but the best tolerance you have the system, less workload. So this will mean challenging flexibility in implementing every dysfunctionality. That was a big challenge for us.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 30:33
So one more question that we got from the audience. Before we close it out, how did you overcome challenges in Latin American countries to improve the auto cash rate?
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 30:48
I can tap on the Martin. I will let you add in because I know you won’t want to throw some questions. So thanks. Thanks, Adriana. For the questions. It’s a very good question and I have to say that we have a lot of challenges across the globe and then you have a good catch with the Latin. and for Latin for us. The main, let’s see how we were able to improve them dealt cash rate, the automation was, yeah, thanks to the support of credit dispute collection community, where we get the credit manager, let’s say, or the customer service, contacting the customer, make sure that we were receiving the remittance advice on time and what we did also was, we enhanced our correspondence, because, in the previous version, we didn’t have a radio signal in. So the customer was still used to the old ways to go through different channels. So with that, we ensure that we receive every old information. I think this is the main challenge we had with Latin receiving information in time, and we are still working on that. So let’s be transparent, Martin.
Martin Doran(Speaker II) 32:04
Yeah, just basically timing in with the same so end-to-end events, showing the email on the correspondence and sent out on the invoice copies on the pre notifications, for example and then just working with the customer contacts. So basically showing the customers that there’s an advantage to send those payment invoices on time and with full details.
Maria Luisa Mancha(Speaker I) 32:28
And maybe here to address Adriana what somewhat we should consider. So we achieved 85% plus automation globally, but that does not mean that, you know, the countries we are on that level. So definitely, there is room for improvement. It is the reason why we have developed the dashboards and the reports because we want to get in all the countries on that level, or at least increase it. So there is still a lot to do. Definitely, we are not at the end of the journey.
Marisol Hernandez(Facilitator) 33:02
Thank you, everybody, for joining today’s session. That’s all the time we have for questions and answers. However, if we were unable to answer your questions, we promise to follow up with you. If you have any additional questions regarding today’s topic, or you’d like to connect with any of our speakers today, please feel free to reach out to the contact that you see on your screen. Also, please don’t forget to check out the Shared Services tech event LinkedIn page to obtain a copy of today’s presentation and join the discussions with all of us. Find it available in the details section on your screen. So for the next session that we have for today is a virtual tour of Highradius cash application cloud that begins at 9:45 Central Standard Time. Again, before you leave, we would really appreciate it if you took a few seconds to leave a review and share your feedback. Again, thank you to our speakers, Maria Lu and Martin, for joining us today, and have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.
Martin Doran(Speaker II) 34:08
Bye.
