Ultimate Supplier Management

“It’s a project with an infinite internal rate of return,” says Sanjay Singh, Hershey’s VP of Internal Audit.   “How many dollars of chocolate would we have to sell to equal a million in recoveries?”
 
He knew that a recovery audit was a good idea from his experience and the benchmarking he does with industry peers.  He, Jay Cheedella, VP Global Business Services, and Jonathan Laubenstine, Senior Director of Internal Audit, have been overseeing the project that’s already added over a million dollars a year to Hershey’s bottom line.
 
No headcount additions.  No budget outlay.  Money back. Control gaps revealed.
 
Hershey likes the apexanalytix service model because it requires very little of Hershey’s AP time and gives them a lot of insights and analytics.  Everything was agreed to up front and then apexanalytix went to work. 
 
The details that apexanalytix gives Hershey’s on why the overpayments were made help point out control gaps.  Sanjay is practical about this. “Some gaps are difficult and expensive to close,” says Sanjay.  “The recovery audit is the filter on the back end when perfecting a control comes at a prohibitive cost. That’s okay; the recovery audit is that secondary control. We’re covered either way.”

Listen to the podcast to learn:

• How Jay, Sanjay and Jonathan sold the recovery audit internally.
• Managing a recovery audit and reporting success.
• How automation, RPA, and the largest supplier database in the industry make the apexanalytix audit better.
• The value of continuous recovery audits.

Download slides: https://bit.ly/3LYatr6  
Watch webinar: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/how-hershey-s-kissing-overpayments-goodbye

Speakers:

• Jonathan B. Laubenstine, Senior Director Internal Audit, The Hershey Company
• Sanjay Singh, Vice President, Internal Audit, The Hershey Company
• Mark Brousseau President, Brousseau & Associates
• Phil Beane, COO & EVP, Global Transaction Compliance Solutions, apexanalytix

Joni Geurts, Director, Accounts Payable & Fraud at JetBlue Airways, tells her story of joining the AP department and addressing the biggest issue for her team: limited visibility into SAP.

She couldn’t get the information she needed about suppliers, identify duplicate payments or flag suspicious supplier payments as potentially fraudulent. Attend this webinar to hear how she addressed these issues with complementary apexanalytix solutions to fill SAP gaps. Additionally, she will discuss their recent transition to S/4 HANA and what you should plan for.

The discussion will focus on:

• What keeps the AP team up at night: duplicate payments, fraud, & fines
• Why duplicate invoices slip through SAP but can still be caught before payment
• How fraudsters try to get past their controls
• Technology and process improvements that ensure supplier compliance and stop fines
• Recent transition to S/4 HANA

Speakers:

• Joni Guerts, Director, Accounts Payable & Fraud at JetBlue Airways
• Akhilesh Agarwal, COO & EVP, Global Procure to Pay Solutions & Applied Technology

Download slides:  https://bit.ly/3JrT2xn
Watch webinar: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/how-jetblue-prevents-fraud-duplicate-payments-and-fines-0

A frequent question that Chuck Stefanosky, Supplier Diversity Director at Independence Blue Cross, receives is “How do I set my company’s supplier diversity goals?” Chuck’s answer every time: match the diversity of your workforce and suppliers with the community you serve.

This strategy has helped guide Independence Blue Cross’ award-winning DEI program for 35 years and helped it grow its annual spend with diverse suppliers to 26%. 

With the program reporting directly to procurement, they have full visibility of where money is being spent today and where diverse spend could be increased. Additionally, Chuck will discuss how supplier management technology ensures that they are capturing all diverse suppliers in their supply base with as minimal manual work as possible.

Listen to the session to learn about:
•    Creating a sustainable supplier diversity program with sustainable spend
•    Automating supplier management to ensure supplier diversity identification and certificate validation
•    Supporting diverse suppliers' working capital

Speakers:

• Akhilesh Agarwal, SVP, Global Business Partner Technology Solutions at apexanalytix
• Chuck Stefanosky, Supplier Diversity Director at Independence Blue Cross

Watch webinar: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/getting-diverse-supplier-spend-26

Dig into the brand new 2022 findings from the annual, global, AP Metrics that Matter Report with report author Bob Cohen of Ardent Partners, P2P senior executive Kevin Jacobik of Kimberly-Clark and market and product strategy leader Danny Thompson of apexanalytix.

AP has a fresh opportunity to rewrite the script on best practices as we slowly turn the corner from massive business, economic and social system disruption. Kevin knows a thing or two about AP best practices since he runs one of the few AP profit centers in the Global 2000 (Just one in seven AP organizations is a profit center). Here are some of the things Kevin, Bob and Danny talk about:

• AP’s Growing Impact: Reaching beyond AP’s operational role, top practitioners are working with Procurement, Treasury, Internal Audit and Risk and other partners to solve P2P problems, improve working capital and minimize risk in the supply chain.
• The Rise of Invoice and Payment Fraud: A layered approach to prevent supplier fraud is best. From access controls to precise identification of bank account ownership, the sophistication of your controls approach must match the creativity of fraudsters.
• Digital Transformation of AP: The latest numbers from the report and Kevin explain how his team achieved 95.7% E-invoicing and 99.6% E-payments and how they are pushing for even more.
• Crystal Ball: What’s AP’s Future? Consider that AP is the last stop in the P2P process and in the best position to see all the upstream issues preventing accurate and timely payments to vendors. “AP needs a seat at the table as business decisions are being made,” says Kevin. 
• Moving Past the Pandemic Era: Lessons learned that have made processes and communication better and, of course, more digital.

Go confidently into 2022 with hard data and new insights!

Download slides: https://bit.ly/351CPAy
Watch webinar: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/ap-steps-out-its-comfort-zone

Speakers:

• Danny Thompson, SVP, Market and Product Strategy at apexanalytix
• Kevin Jacobik, Senior Manager Procure to Pay North America at Kimberly Clark Corporation
• Bob Cohen, Vice President of Research at Ardent Partners

Jose Sorondo joined lululemon as Director, Global Finance Shared Services in 2018 and has helped the company by leading finance shared services during its rocket ship growth.

It takes a lot of suppliers to run a fast-paced apparel company. In AP, once in a while, one of these suppliers would call to say: “There has been an error in the payment received.” During massive growth, duplicate payments happen. Having suppliers point this out is amazing. But how many didn’t call the AP desk? And, on average, only 20% of audit recoveries stem from duplicate payments. Most are hidden credits from cancelled invoices, returns, payments to the wrong suppliers and the list goes on.

Hear Jose tell his story of growth at lululemon and how an AP recovery audit has helped provide insight to improve operations.

• Why lululemon decided to do a recovery audit
• How much time was spent on the audit (when they were already busy)
• Creating business cases with audit findings
• Addressing multiple recoveries stemming from one supplier
• Next steps for lululemon shared services

Download slides: https://bit.ly/3oWXWuX
Watch webinar: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/hot-yoga-cool-clothes-better-shared-services-processes

Speakers:

• Jose Sorondo, Director, Global Finance Shared Services at lululemon
• Phil Beane, SVP, Global Field Operations at apexanalytix
• Mark Brousseau, President at Brousseau & Associates

Call Nigel Coffey a change agent, or call him a serial innovator. Everywhere Nigel takes on a new leadership challenge, he executes a program that adds tangible bottom-line value to his new organization. Starting with industry benchmarking, following with an audit of payments to suppliers to identify root cause issues and control weaknesses, and progressing through a systematic program of automation, Nigel has succeeded time and time again in moving each company to world-class procure-to-pay processes and technologies.

In his career Nigel has held senior business service, finance and transformation roles at Pfizer, PepsiCo, Shire Pharmaceuticals/Takeda and now Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. As the Head of Finance operations at this rapidly-growing biotech, he's helping optimize the processes to help this company produce leading-edge therapies based on the latest RNA interference science.

Hear Nigel and Danny Thompson, SVP of Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix, as they discuss:

1. How fresh industry benchmarking information on finance and procure-to-pay best practices can be leveraged to establish goals and inform business cases for talent and technology.
2. The one-two punch of recovery audit: improving AP profitability and uncovering weak controls, supplier issues and root causes of overpayments.
3. Optimising prior to automating: why improving and rationalising end-to-end processes, policies, procedures and controls is critical before selecting and implementing technology. 

Featuring: The latest 2021 benchmarking results from apexanalytix’s P2PKey Practices Benchmarking survey. The newest P2P survey data and insights from top tier global companies.

Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3dFttvn
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/one-leader-s-proven-formula-dramatically-improve-finance-and-gbs-operations

Speakers:

• Nigel Coffey, Head of Finance Operations, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
• Danny Thompson, SVP, Market and Product Strategy at apexanalytix

Moving to a shared services environment allowed CommScope’s finance team to have a greater focus on improving operations while realizing greater efficiencies, cost savings, and proactive measures to ensure tax compliance.

CommScope acquired Arris Communications and observed that Arris was utilizing apexanalytix for AP recovery audits. This service provided an external review of payments and outlined opportunities to prevent overpayments in the future.

As part of CommScope’s continuous improvement and standardization process, Alex Meyer, Director of Shared Services at CommScope, extended the apexanalytix audit to include CommScope entities to recapture potential overpayments similar to the recoveries that Arris experienced.

Listen to this episode to hear Alex talk about:

• Post-acquisition: merging two large finance organizations
• Utilizing audit service results to close control gaps and standardize processes
• Leverage contingency-based work to improve financial results
• Best reasons to perform a sales and use tax audit

Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3F633zb
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/how-acquisition-helped-commscope-improve-shared-services-and-enhance-recoveries

Speakers:

• Alex Meyer Director of Shared Service Operations at CommScope
• Mark Brousseau, President at Brousseau & Associates
• Phil Beane SVP, Global Field Operations at apexanalytix

In partnership with apexanalytix, this ASUG podcast will deliver insights designed to support your work with SAP technology.

When Koch Business Solutions realized it needed to stay in front of the growing risks around supplier payment fraud—as well as build an efficient, leading practices workflow for supplier setup and maintenance—it was motivated to find and implement an automated supplier onboarding solution that included risk and fraud validations.

If you are also interested in improving efficiency and reducing the risks involved in setting up suppliers, watch this webcast to hear Koch leaders discuss:

• Multi-tiered security measures deterring fraudsters
• Master data processes focused on independent banking validation
• User controls in supplier setup

Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3GtabWC
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/rapid-response-how-koch-business-solutions-addressed-their-bank-account-fraud

Speakers:

• Dennis Claussen, Business Transformation Delivery Director at Koch Business Solutions
• Ray Swetnam, Supplier Enablement Leader at Koch Business Solutions
• Barry Cook, Director Pre-sales Consulting at apexanalytix

At the beginning of their search, Panasonic was only using Ariba Procure to Pay. For the other processes across the Source to Pay lifecycle, Panasonic had manual processes. In 2019, Panasonic started reviewing different solutions through a comprehensive RFP utilizing analyst reports. As they were looking through the different solutions, they could easily see that one solution is going to do one thing really well, but won’t do everything they needed really well.

Panasonic really needed to ask “What do we want the technology to do for us?”. This process included discussing what the requirements were for their 13 business units and comparing these with the different solutions to see how they could create a Best-of-Breed stack.
 
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/panasonics-best-breed-vs-single-source-p2p-solutions-stack

Speakers:

• Michael Wang, Senior Manager, Procurement Strategy at Panasonic Corporation
• Michael Cadieux, Founder of Procurement Foundry
• Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix

Large scale M&A creates a lot of work for finance teams. Everyone gets busy. Systems need to get consolidated, vendor masters merged, suppliers communicated to, and so on.

When everyone is busy, a common project that gets postponed or cancelled is a recovery audit. At Alaska Airlines, it fell off the to-do list for several years.

“I didn’t think apexanalytix was going to find much, but knew some mistakes were made during the merger period,” said Lori Foley, Director, Customer & Vendor Payments at Alaska Airlines. “Pretty quickly in the audit, we started seeing recoveries from warranties and rebates. Activities we didn’t have visibility to.”

Like most other companies, Alaska saw that the mistakes were happening outside AP. And the audit provided the necessary data to close the gaps through technology or periodic cross-departmental reviews of known issues.

If you have postponed an audit or just haven’t had one in years, this webinar will provide you with the reasons why you should have one every year – from the perspective of someone who has postponed it before.

Watch the webinar to hear Lori to discuss:

Best time to get IT resources for projects
What happens outside AP, stays outside AP
The Deployment Spike
A case for an annual recovery audit
Addressing control gaps with new tech: CLM, eProcurement, eSettlement
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3j6Ph66
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/how-alaska-airlines-fixing-errors-caused-ma

Speakers:
Lori Foley Director, Customer & Vendor Payments at Alaska Airlines
Phil Beane, SVP, Global Field Operations at apexanalytix
Mark Brousseau, President at Brousseau & Associates