Facilitator 0:01
Hello, everyone. Welcome to credit tech 2020. Thank you for joining today’s session. My name is Chelsea Beal and I’ll be your facilitator today. All participants will be on mute. So if you have a question, please enter it in the q&a section below your attendee screen. A recording of today’s session will be available next week. We strongly recommend that you visit the credit tech LinkedIn page where you can find a copy of today’s presentation with additional resources and materials. That being said, welcome to today’s expert session, digital transformation, and a slow economy make mistakes that set you up for failure. I’m thrilled to welcome our first presenter Mustafa Mogh who is the market face of G BFS candidate loci C at Bristol Myers Squibb. He’s his unique combination of expertise in project management and financial management in different industries, including especially pharma, brokerage, beverage, manufacturing, and many more. We also have GDB, who is a P2P and OTC consultant at iOS M. She is a 27 year veteran of Johnson, Korea has focused on procuring to pay Order-To-Cashin developing shared service centers in the US Europe, earning a high recognition for process improvements in major cost savings. Now Judy Mustapha, I’ll hand it over to you.
Judy Bicking 1:28
Thank you, Chelsea. Welcome, everyone. Glad you could join us. This is what we’ll be covering during this session. And there we go. And I want to get started right away with the Order-To-Cashspace, it is changing rapidly. And we’re going to look over this space by redefining our true value. How are we going to do that we’re going to create a new mission and vision? And to do that you need to see the process from your customers’ experiences, building cohesive teams to move from transactional thinking to promoting and providing a profit-making strategy to prepare for the next time, there will be the next time. The only difference between COVID and our past financial crisis is this one hit us personally, professionally, and globally.
Judy Bicking 2:39
So I agree with the statistics that you’re looking at on the screen, as I’ve worked with many companies globally, and interviewed solution providers as to what are the ingredients to the most successful implementations, and today we’re going to cover some of this valuable information. So the factors to avoid while automating your AR. This goes over factors for your success and the automation implementation. What I have experienced in my career is most failure is due to not bringing an end-to-end team together to map the current process. Most take their assumptions into the design, what I call the noise. Instead of getting the order to the cash team, including sales reps, the order picking team billing, cash application, customer master file deductions, credit application collections, and your customers together to map the actual process with metrics to support how often certain situations happen. What are the real bottlenecks, not the noise, not your assumptions? And what are your discrepancies? One example that I hear over and over is the assumption that the customer is taking extended terms on purpose to stretch their cash when statistics show that 75% of invoices have some type of discrepancy, and I hate to say it, but the customer is usually right, almost all of the time. This is why it is so important to get the end-to-end team together, find out what is really going on in your process, how often it occurs, and then choose the correct automation to match your findings. Automation will automate the customer’s order all the way through your product and the quantities by creating an automation business plan. And including these six steps that we’re going to go over to prepare you to develop a well-thought-out automation vision for this election to implementation And then to maintain a long-term vision. Chelsea, we’re going to take a look, we have our full question. Go ahead and do Judy. Nope. I’m sorry. It’s all yours.
Facilitator 5:17
It looks like we have our full bore first poll question. So the question is, which of these areas are your AR needs automation? Is it credit management, B collection management, C billing and payments, B, Cash Forecasting, or E, all of the above? Should be living now.
Judy Bicking 5:43
So I really want to encourage you to place your answer in the area. And I’m going to turn this over to Mustapha, while we’re waiting for the results.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 5:56
Thank you very much, God. Thank you very much. I’ll say. First of all, it’s an honor and a pleasure to speak with the audience today about how we are tackling the failure at each stage of cash automation during the COVID-19 crisis. So COVID-19 has imposed a shift in our daily operation, especially the fact that automation is no longer a nice to have, that it’s a must to have and a necessity. Hence, there are three stages to order cash and to consider the automation of order to cash. I will cover the three stages that are important in Order-To-Cash today. Namely, first, the planning, starting from choosing the suitable product selection of the vendor and the contingency planning. Second is the deployment, starting from deciding the strategy, fixing integration, testing the system to the user guide to the user acceptance, acceptance testing. And last is the post-go-live. In this last stage of automation, it is extremely important to focus on the end incubation support, satisfying the customer, and matrix improvement. And in the next slide, Judy, and I will walk you through these different stages that start with the planning phase. In the planning phase, it is the most important and of the first stage of DC automation. The best approach is to set the best practices to follow to avoid any roadblock during the automation. There is no best script for planning as perfection doesn’t exist. However, there are a few elements that I suggest you should consider. First is assessment, then determining the to state identifying the scope for improvement, exploring available options, finalizing the vendor. And at the end, finalize the customer requirement. In the next slide, Judy, and I will walk you through these different elements to the overview.
Judy Bicking 8:40
Well, before we start, actually, Chelsea, I think the results are right.
Facilitator 8:48
Yes, they are. So we have 9% for credit management 22% for collections management, 18% for billing and payments 11% for credit, Cash Forecasting, and 38% for all of the above.
Judy Bicking 9:04
Wow, great. Thank you very much for participating in that.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 9:09
Yeah, that’s amazing.
Judy Bicking 9:12
So let’s start with the as-is. And as Mustapha said, this is really a very important part of what you need to do to get the right automation for the categories that you’re looking to implement. So the very first thing I would suggest is engaging a sponsor, a champion, someone who’s going to support this project, and also have the ability to remove any opposition, communicating the project to those who are going to be affected, and then you need to keep communicating throughout the project. That’s one of the areas that we tend to think we’re doing enough but you can never do enough. Ask for volunteers as they’re willing. But the best said advice I ever got was for me to include the person I most wanted to avoid. You know who that is, the naysayer, the complainer you’ve got to bring them into this circle, you’ve got to listen to them without being defensive. You want to hear what they have to say. So the project will be successful. This way, you won’t miss any key points that usually cause dissatisfaction or scope creep, which can affect the go-live date, not to mention the extra cost. Also, take the time to interview and understand your customers’ AP process. This can be priceless, having a dedicated workspace for the team. And today we’re mostly working virtually, it can be done virtually. But make sure you use something like a tool that lets you share a document so that while we were here, if we were all a team, this document if you added something, I would see it and if someone else added if I added we’re working with a live document.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 11:07
Thank you, Judy, one of the components is determining the to-be state. In this step of planning stages, for your OTC or dimension, I would suggest you avoid a realistic and objective within the defined time frame. Strategize for Eurex your enterprise, form a core task force to enable virtual carbolic collaboration in the new working environment. Select the right platform for your business. Defining what constitutes automation success puts a plan for changes. Employee continuous improvement, as successful automation should continuously be improved over time. And mostly, you have to always ask what could go wrong, which is a realistic and objective being set up.
Judy Bicking 12:15
The next thing we want to do is identify the scope of the project. What are all the facts, all the points, all the people that you are going to include in this development? Now, when you’re doing that scope, you need to build an ROI that does not totally rely on headcount, you have to think out of the box, this may require needing to rescale your team. Let’s start by knowing how much your current process costs. That’s the as-is state, you can use the total cost of ownership, activity-based costing, or even sampling, which can be fairly accurate. From here, we want to build a very focused profit-making strategy, a strategy that says no to an order? How do you do that? study all the new payment strategies. This will mean you probably have to adopt some new policies and procedures to implement those, and it means that we have to change. One of the ones we’ve resisted over time is credit cards because we really want to avoid paying those points. Our job is to protect the cash. But this means we need to also support sales. How do you never say no to an order? Take the order, even if it is a high risk, just ask for their credit card number. It’s really worth the points. We offer terms 2% 10. Net 30. Well pay 2% and points and get the money on day one. It’s just changing the way we think about it. We want to explore options. But we also want to make sure that we are looking at it from a long-term perspective. For instance, does a solution provider have longevity? Do they maintain and improve the automation? Do they have a user group to help you get connected with other users so that you can continue to benchmark everyone you know the 10 heads are better than one? Well, I like to hear how other people are using the system so I can adopt some of the best practices that they’ve developed or solutions to obstacles that I’m incurring in my Order-To-Cash process. Once you have developed the options into a working process, it is imperative to do an impact assessment. Does your new approach deliver the desired results that Mr. Offer was just talking about? Make sure you have made a list of what you absolutely must-have. What’s nice to have and then evaluate multiple vendors, service providers to determine who you can partner with and who’s going to provide you the best service and longevity.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 15:25
In the step of finalizing the vendor, it is extremely important to make a proper valuation as, without a proper valuation, you may end up needing multiple IT service providers to fix you or the cash process. So you’re not only fixing the actual problem you have but you will end up using different service providers to fix multiple problems that you created. Make sure that you ensure that your vendor understands your unique business case. Use a checklist to prepare your criteria and characterize them to make a list more manageable for vendor assessment. technical criteria need to be evaluated by your technology team. Check and validate the vendor experience. Make sure that the vendor provides you the support to check the existing vendor relationship and this can be done through checking three references or even more if needed to be most importantly focused on when the ability to design and support the end to end process.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 16:45
In finalizing the customer requirement, which is the last step of your planning to finalize your process, you should apply the rules of 80-2080 of your OTC needs to be completed and full full full full by the solution only the rest 20% needs customization. If not, you may end up paying for both customization and the solution. The customization makes your plan very successful as it will give you a clear path to what you expect and solve. It is also critical in this last step to customize work despite whatever system integration in the post pandemic including a thorough work process scenario etc. to successfully complete the integration of the system in this stage of deployment, which is the second Can you move to the slides for this? Okay, sorry,
Judy Bicking 18:04
it wasn’t going for it. There you go.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 18:07
Okay. So, Julie and I will walk you through the first stage which is the planning. I will walk you through the second stage which is the deployment. The second important stage of your OTC automation is obviously the deployment. Indeed, the deployment is the stage where there are the highest chances of things going wrong. Hence during this stage a few key technical steps need to be taken in consideration are the major tests are what to give a deployment pipeline is revalue. To succeed in this stage you need to follow basic steps that should include solution approach, integration, testing and user acceptance testing. Each of these steps are extremely valuable to your deployment and should be executed in sequential order.
Judy Bicking 19:14
So the rollout plan makes the success of your automation project very visible. So plan with that in mind, too many who have had negative feedback when they went live skipped a very vital part of the plan. And that is bringing that end to end team together mapping out the as is and those who when they went live across the entire organization. So consider rolling out by department or branch even by the customer to create a realistic timeline. Whenever we missed a timeline, the rumor mill would say See, I knew it wouldn’t work. If your timeline is getting crunched. Do not skip or shorten the training. This is critical To your success, prior to going live, invite these areas to learn the technology. Use your documents as I have found if you use their documents, there’s a greater learning speed to success. So don’t use the solution providers. Ask your customers within your company to provide you with easy and complicated ones then create scenarios with their Doc’s. So when you’re looking at the setup, and integration what could go wrong? Well, nothing if you start with your as is and build a realistic implementation by designing a new process that uses the new automation without customizing it. And that’s really a key word here, change your process, not the system, make sure the integration to the ERP system is seamless. The best way to choose the system that will be the master the ERP or the new automation, there has to be one source of truth makes sure that every time the master is added or updated, the other system is automatically added or updated real time during this during the designing stage, you should engage the teams to clean up any data files, and this should be completed before you go live. So for example, the big one is the customer master file.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 21:40
In the deployment, one of the most important steps is testing. Now the question that we should ask ourselves is what could go wrong? Simply missing critical use cases during testing. Testing is the unique important step in preparation for the final stage. In successful or unprepared testing is a receipt of the disaster for an AI and ERP. Make sure you involve multiple people for each module with multiple scenarios. It is very common and very tempting to take existing testing scenarios that were built for a similar business and use them. However, since every business is unique and has different processes, make sure to cover all your uniqueness in your testing and allow enough time to go through all possibilities. Even if it may impact your deadline, always remember, better be safe than sorry. As you are finalizing your testing seven elements need to be taken in consideration as prerequisites of next steps. Such is the user acceptance testing. First you need to use the first unit testing, unit testing integration testing and system testing should be completed with no showstopper, high medium defect in the system integration test phase only cosmetic or is acceptable before the UI at regression testing should be completed with no major defects. All the reported defects should be fixed and tested before the UAP traceability matrix for all testing should be completed and the UAT environment must be ready. So once you have your environment ready, then you can go to the final steps of your deployment. Acceptance testing should demonstrate to those who will be purchasing using or managing the system that the system is ready for primetime. The last step of the new deployment stage is user acceptance testing. Therefore, what could go wrong? The failure of adapting the changes to in by the new system in most of the time, and users may be very reluctant or not engage to the new changes. In such cases, you must be prepared for resistance or worker termination and Goetsch adoption rates during and post-go-live. Taking into consideration that you need the creation of UAV test cases along with the UAV plan creation and exit criteria for the UAV plus a record of the result. The UAC is the responsibility of the user. What I mean typically when I’m typically referring to is the stakeholder who will use the system to support the roles in the day-to-day operation of the business. At least some of these users have hopefully been involved in the elicitation of the user requirements. Why do we ideally want to ensure that the software system that has been created will support the regular operations of the business including anticipated variants to the norm? To achieve this, we have to ensure that we test in the context of the relevant business purposes and processes, Information System and business rules, does the system really support these things, we will implicitly assume that we are also testing the user which is the clinical user procedure and the user manual. Finally, in your exit criteria, and before moving into the production, you need to consider that no critical effect, no critical defect is often satisfactory, and you sign off meeting all the stakeholders. In the next slide, which is the possible life and before we, what we like to emphasize here, as the last stage of the, the automation is the third element that you need to consider, which is composed by the go-live hyper care And the delivering promises ROI. Let’s talk about the possible life of HyperCam.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 26:53
A goal life plan is this step that shouldn’t be taken before actually implementing or changing any changes in a program. The purpose of having a goal life plan is to help ensure that the actual transition runs smoothly. On the other hand, to avoid a common to, to provide a common definition. Hyper care is the period of time immediately following a system called light where an elevated level of support is available to ensure the seamless adoption of a new system. three elements need to be taken into consideration and checkmark before you go live. First, make sure the solution is stable. Second, have at least two weeks for a hyper care period. And lastly, commitment and collaboration with your vendor for resolution of issues. Over to Judy.
Judy Bicking 28:06
Thank you. So the best practices while you’re automating it’s always on the to-do list for HR leaders. But now it is getting to the top of our list COVID may have pushed us. But in reality, we really need to do this for our success as well. Accounts receivable in a transformation in a slow economy and what to keep in mind. For me, the ROI was to prove and get our budget for these products, projects. But most importantly, how it’s to validate our success. And you need to get metrics in order to do that before. And the after. And during this will validate it and make sure that we’re including the bottom line in the ROI changing. Our attitude about the work that we do is critical. And this was a major turning point in my career not to base this on headcount, but basically on profitability and focusing on that. So how can you increase the bottom line? Two easy projects come to mind. One is dynamic discounting, which will improve cash flow. It also includes new payment methods like taking the P card for instance, basically aligning accounts receivable with sales to improve and accept all orders from all customers.
Moustapha Ould Bin Mogdad 29:52
Thank you shouldn’t go to slide 24 the slide before?
Judy Bicking 29:57
Yeah, we’re actually at our time so I’m not sure.
Moderator 30:04
Yes, so we are going to go ahead and go straight to the poll question. So would you like to know more about AR and automation? And the questions are yes, I would like to receive some resources slash materials for research purposes. B. Yes. I’d like to speak to an expert or see Yes, but I would like to connect once we’re back in the office. I’ll start the poll right now. And while we are doing the poll, I would like to thank everyone for joining today’s panel session. If you have any additional questions regarding today’s topic, or you’d like to connect with any other presenters for discussion, please feel free to reach out to Julie den contact details are being displayed on the screen coming up. We would like to see your response on one of our interesting polls running on our event page right now if you can find the link in the poll attachment section.
Perfect. So right now we have yes at 61%. I would like to receive some more resources and faster materials for research purposes. Give me 5% Yes, I would like to speak to an expert. And 23% Yes, but I would like to connect once we are back in the office. Great. Thank you. I would like to take a moment to invite everyone to our happy hour session with Sam this year. As you take you on an adventure to learn about wines in the old versus new world tomorrow at 2:30 pm. You can register for this session using the link that is populated in the attacks in session, and we look forward to hosting you and thank you everyone for attending our today’s session. We would like to invite you to our next session at 11:45 am titled virtual tours of HighRadius EIPP Cloud See you all soon
