Ultimate Supplier Management: Recent Episodes
apexanalytix
Welcome to the Ultimate Supplier Management podcast from apexanalytix. This podcast features procure-to-pay leaders and how they are creating efficiencies, protecting against fraud and accelerating initiatives across their organization. The episodes are audio versions of apexanalytix webinars with slides and video in the episode descriptions. www.apexanalytix.com
“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:
- 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.
- The one-two punch of recovery audit: improving AP profitability and uncovering weak controls, supplier issues and root causes of overpayments.
- 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
Airlines have to deal with disruptions more than any industry. Through it all, the Delta procure-to-pay team has focused on staying a step ahead of the game.
This presentation will look at the challenges Delta has faced through the years, the proactive P2P technology investments they’ve made in response, and how they’ve navigated the work-from-home challenges of COVID-19 without missing a beat.
Then we walk through apexportal’s risk and fraud prevention dashboard:
- Supplier Mapping: Mapping of all suppliers in your supply chain with geographical risk areas based on composite risk (everything summed up: trend analysis, news, financial, fraud…)
- Trend Analysis: How companies have fared over time. Commercial real estate, semiconductors, aluminum…the supply chain changes. Visual trend analysis shows it, plus you get alerts on changes based on your threshold.
- Fraud!!! We analyze suppliers on 30 attributes: Employee/vendor match (bank accounts, Tax ID, address), Benford’s law, addresses (a lot of them are prisons), and 27 more!!!
Speakers:
- Lewis Moore, GM, Procurement & Receivable Services at Delta
- Barry Cook, Director, Pre-Sales Consulting at apexanalytix
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3APwLFs
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/360-degree-controls-technology
**Global Process Owners Europe, Virtual Event Hosted by SSON
Speakers:**
- Cristiana Rodrigues, Director GBS Operations Accounts Payables & T&E at Adidas
- Phil Beane, Senior Vice President, Global Field Ops at apexanalytix
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3CnnnKU
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/resources/webinars/adidas-agility-explosive-shared-services-growth-covid-19-and-campus-future
Only 14% of AP departments are a profit center. (apex 2021 survey)
Kimberly-Clark is part of that elite group.
So…we enlisted AP veteran Kevin Jacobik (also an Army veteran, dad and has a huge COVID beard) to talk about how Kimberly-Clark does what most companies don’t.
"I am excited about talking with everyone about our 3 step process to move AP from a cost center to a profit center because every company can do this. AP wasn’t always a profit center.
There were a lot of manual tasks that kept us busy. As an organization, we embraced change and began implementing technology to, simply put: get stuff done faster. Get software to do the things that wasted our time.
No one wants to process paper checks. We sent out 20,000 paper checks every month. Tons of printing, signing, mailing, getting returned checks, calling suppliers, re-mailing.
It is not about buying very expensive software or trying something brand new. It is about following a proven plan focused on three key areas: creating a revenue source, identifying control gaps and removing tedious manual processes."
Speakers:
- Kevin Jacobik, Sr. Manager – GBS NA Procure to Pay at Kimberly-Clark
- Pete Erdner, Vice President, Commercial Operations at apexanalytix
- Mark Brousseau President, Brousseau & Associates
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3m0qH9w
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-learn-how-kimberly-clark-put-itself-top-14-ap-departments
Are you in procurement, sourcing, supply chain? Want the freshest data on procurement key performance indicators? Watch this webinar featuring data from the 2021 Ardent Partners Report: Procurement Metrics that Matter.
Supplier enablement? Up! Contract-compliant transactions? Up! Addressable spend that is sourced? Down.
Gerard Cardillo reminds us that you can only improve what you measure and tells us his fave metrics: percent of spend on PO and invoices blocked due to pricing/receipt. Andrew Bartolini drills down into the data gathered from hundreds of procurement execs worldwide. And Danny Thompson grills Andrew on the story behind the data.
Highlighted content:
- What procurement is focusing on now as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic
- Why four key metrics have shifted over the last year
- How procurement and disbursement functions can use metrics to improve together
Speakers:
- Gerard Cardillo, Executive Dir. Global Categories Procurement, Charles River Labs
- Andrew Bartolini, Founder & Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market and Product Strategy at apexanalytix
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3AKdjue
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-best-class-vs-everybody-else
Laying the groundwork for good supplier data governance started with figuring out what granular aspects of supplier MDM were different from other domains like customer and item. First, Karen Coronado, the data governance team and stakeholders throughout the company established the Supplier MDM goals specific to their company. Then, they decided to invest in a built-for-purpose solution to accelerate ROI. Now, the company is implementing a supplier management platform that comes with best practices and out-of-the box templates.
Watch this webinar to hear Karen discuss:
- Registering suppliers with an automated process that uses customized business rules and automated approval workflows
- Avoiding supplier fraud and risk by closing control gaps in supplier setup and management
- Enforcing standard payment terms
- Pushing more suppliers toward electronic payments
- Improving strategic sourcing efforts
- Saving FTE time and money
Speakers:
- Karen Coronado, Manager, Data Governance at Lennox International
- Akhilesh Agarwal, SVP, Global Business Partner Technology Solutions at apexanalytix
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3k0wusR
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-get-and-drive
Post-merger with Safeway, Albertsons launched a series of business transformation projects. For one, Gregg Maxwell, Group Vice President, NSC wanted the future of supplier onboarding.
In this webinar, Gregg talks about how they reduced 170,000 supplier records to 70,000 active vendors. He’ll explain how they turned the onboarding process that involved four systems, ten departments and fifteen documents to one automated, supplier-facing onboarding portal.
Now, Albertsons will complete supplier validations through real-time integration with 650+ global government, regulatory and authoritative third-party data sources and 2 Billion external reference records. The company will defend against supplier fraud with a series of automated supplier record change controls, including real-time confirmation of bank account ownership. Machine Learning and big data analytics with IBM Watson help with the automation throughout.
Speakers:
- Gregg Maxwell, CPA Group Vice President, NSC, Albertsons
- Akhilesh Agarwal SVP Global Business Partner Technology Solutions, apexanalytix
- Mark Brousseau President, Brousseau & Associates
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/37NWrq4
Webinar video: apexanalytix.com/video-supplier-management-best-practice-trailblazer-albertsons
apexanalytix’s research has shown that 25.73% vendor invoice terms are better for the supplier than the original negotiated terms. This podcast dives into how payment terms get changed and financial impact to working capital. And, more importantly, how every supplier can be assessed against previously negotiated terms and opportunities for extensions, baseline date changes, or payment schedule changes.
Listen to the podcast for:
- Research on financial impact of unenforced payment terms
- A granular payment terms standardization and extension project process flow
- EU & UK regulation updates that can impact payment terms
- Mistakes that companies typically make during a payment terms extension project
- Payment terms that world class companies currently have
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3sjV5fY
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-ssl-push-dpo-envelope-webinar
Speakers:
- Alfonso Ricotta, Global Finance Change Management Lead at Indeed
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix
2021 is the year of building resilience across the supply chain. But our Dec. 2020 survey, showed that 60% of respondents either have a limited or no supplier risk management program in place. This podcast is for everyone looking to expand or start a supplier risk management program.
Defining Supplier Risk Management: Ask 5 People, Get 10 Different Answers
The episode discusses Gartner’s definition and what apexanalytix views as the foundation of supplier risk management (hint: without it your company will be subject to payment fraud, fines, and costly errors).
A Practitioner Perspective: How Did COVID-19 Change the Risk Picture?
Joni Guerts, Director of Payments at JetBlue Airways, discusses which supplier risk factors have increased in priority, how supplier relationships were tested over the past year. Additionally, she will share a fraud story on how a hacker attempted to update a supplier bank account and steal millions.
Gartner Survey: Disruption Mitigation
The Gartner report features a survey of 500+ supply chain professionals and presents the tactics currently being used to mitigate disruption related to supplier risk management.
apexanalytix Survey: Bank Account Validation
For additional practitioner data, apexanalyt's recent survey shows how companies are currently validating bank account changes while most people are working from home (and don’t answer their office lines).
No Risk Management Program?
Danny and Joni answer "What would you do before investing $1 in software?".
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3iOyghn
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-supplier-risk-management
Speakers:
- Joni Geurts, Director of Accounts Payable, Fraud at JetBlue Airways
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix
2020 was the turning point for virtual everything: work-from-home, remote learning, online socializing. Disruption drove automation from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-do,” in procure-to-pay. And not only for the largest companies, but into the mid-market as well.
Listen to Gerard Cardillo, procurement executive, innovator and thought leader, for his perspective on the findings from the new Ardent Partners research survey State of ePayables 2021. His company, Charles River Labs, is a rapidly growing $2.7 billion dollar global Clinical Research Organization supporting the pharmaceutical industry from early discovery through safety assessment and manufacturing on the front-lines of pandemic mitigation efforts.
Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners covers the key findings of the new report and Gerard explains how thought leadership in Accounts Payable affects downstream P2P processes. Danny Thompson provides info on how apexanalytix clients are leveraging automation for supplier onboarding and risk management.
Listen to the podcast to get details on the current accounts payable landscape and a sense of where you stand compared to industry leaders.
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/2Ulb5lp
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-ap-metrics-matter-2021
Speakers:
- Gerard Cardillo, Executive Dir. Global Categories Procurement, Charles River Labs
- Bob Cohen, Vice President of Research, Ardent Partners
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy, apexanalytix
Need to onboard a supplier? Email Nick.
Need to update a supplier tax ID? Email Nick.
Need to update a supplier bank account? Email Nick.
Nick has a lot of supplier onboarding and update requests. Some of them have all the info he needs. Most of them require an email back requesting more info. And too many require a third, fourth or fifth email back to the requestor or supplier.
Everyone on the Panasonic procure-to-pay team (not just Nick) knew this wasn’t the most efficient system. It made sense at one point, but now there are much more efficient solutions that can eliminate inefficient manual processes.
During this podcast, Nick Ponzo, Head of Procurement Operations at Panasonic, walks through the changes they made and provide recommendations on how companies in a similar situation can begin eliminating manual processes in their operations.
The podcast includes a discussion on:
- Email-based manual supplier management is, by nature, not secure
- How to bring control to ad hoc supplier decision making
- What apexportal could do that 20 other vendors couldn’t
- RFP recommendations for a supplier management solution
- Plus, Q&A with Nick
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/37N0nYe
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-get-straight-point
Speakers:
- Nicholas Ponzo, Head of Procurement Operations at Panasonic
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix
Presenting deep insights into procurement and the CPO’s hopes and plans for 2021, apexanalytix joins Ardent Partners and Independence Blue Cross (IBX) in this data-packed podcast.
Findings from the State of Procurement 2021 report are presented, with commentary from head of procurement and strategic sourcing Chuck Stefanosky and market and strategy expert Danny Thompson.
You’ll hear:
- How procurement is pivoting from the 2020 COVID-19 disruption to improve processes and practices
- New ways companies are executing on supplier diversity initiatives
- How organizations are gaining efficiencies and enhancing procurement value through supplier automation
- What separates the best from the average procurement organization
- How IBX leveraged a past disruption to weather the ongoing challenges of the pandemic
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3m6JvUw
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-riding-wind-2021
Speakers:
- Chuck Stefanosky, Director, Strategic Sourcing and Procurement, Independence Blue Cross
- Andrew Bartolini, Founder & Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy, apexanalytix
Processing over 8 million invoices in the US is a lot. More than a lot. PepsiCo knows that even if they are the best run accounts payable (AP) operation, they will make overpayments. So every year PepsiCo has apexanalytix perform an AP recovery audit.
PepsiCo spends a minimal amount of time approving claims, gets substantial returns, and receives data-backed insights on why those overpayments were made.
Recently, a higher percentage of recoveries were associated with duplicate payments. What is a key factor? Duplicate vendors in the vendor master.
PepsiCo does not want to accept this as “part of the business” anymore and deployed apexanalytix’s smartvm solution to identify and remove duplicate vendors. Listen to the podcast to hear Julie Becker, Accounting Operations, Sr. Manager at PepsiCo, and Akhilesh Agarwal, SVP, Global Business Partner Technology Solutions at apexanalytix, discuss:
- PepsiCo Intro: $60 billion in spend. 3 ERP’s across 50+ entities. A lot of suppliers.
- Time required for an apexanalytix recovery audit
- Why address duplicate vendors?
- Process to remove duplicate vendors
- smartvm: How it identifies duplicate vendors and validates supplier data
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3jU1Mlq
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-don-t-get-duped-pepsico-gets-rid-duplicate-vendors-and-duplicate-payments
Mike Cadieux, Founder of Procurement Foundry, was joined by Amy Platis, Program Director of Finance at Northwestern Medicine, and Akhilesh Agarwal, SVP of Global Business Partner Technology Solutions at apexanalytix.
Ms. Platis shared how Northwestern Medicine transformed their vendor data from a listing of providers to a data-rich wealth of knowledge. The procure-to-pay team is now able to leverage this data across the enterprise to benchmark critical KPI’s and gain a greater ROI on procure-to-pay initiatives.
Topics that were discussed include:
- Obtaining vendor data and keeping it clean
- Protecting against payment fraud
- Identifying and onboarding diverse suppliers
- Designing and gaining engagement in early payment programs
- Controlling supplier risk in a supplier portal
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3yRgtMj
Webinar recording: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-procurement-foundry-transforming-supplier-data
The FBI reported $26.2 Billion dollars lost to Business Email Compromise (BEC) fraud in the past three years.1
If defrauding companies was legal, the hackers would be on the cover of Forbes for being innovative.
Teams of hackers have invested time, money and resources to trick accounts payable professionals – smart people who are specifically trained not to get tricked – into giving them money. But the hackers are good…ready to pounce on any misstep…and already sitting behind expensive, corporate firewalls.
To help stop them, Early Warning Services was formed by seven US-based banks (including Well Fargo) to validate that payments are going to the legitimate recipients and flag suspicious transactions before they occur. Billions of transactions get analyzed every year and billions of dollars are flagged as high-risk transactions.
For this podcast, we’ve brought together experts from across the payment fraud spectrum (except the hackers) to discuss:
- Current state of payment fraud: trends, types and targets
- Fraud tactics that get by accounts payable controls
- What makes the Early Warning National Shared Database unique
- An overview of a real criminal shared services center dedicated to fraud
- And, as advertised in the title, How to Stop Payment Fraud Even If Your Systems Have Been Hacked!
Speakers:
- Beth Probst, Global Product Manager for AVS at Wells Fargo Bank
- Anil Khilnani, VP & Fraud Prevention Consultant at Wells Fargo Bank
- Danny Thompson, SVP, Market & Product Strategy at apexanalytix
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/3g3SKRw
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-not-if-when-how-stop-payment-fraud-even-if-your-systems-have-been-hacked
1 Sources: The 2020 AFP® Payments Fraud Controls Report and The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Compliance Center (IC3)
Jeff Heinrich, Global Process Lead for P2P at General Mills, is a champion of procure-to-pay best practices. General Mills continuously refines SAP to catch duplicate payments then the AP team runs an internal review as a secondary pass. The company also relies on apexanalytix to complete a 90-day rolling statement audit and an annual duplicate check analysis to find anything that has fallen through the cracks.
General Mills’ recoveries are well below the industry average because of good process controls. But a recovery audit still makes financial sense. The last review returned nearly half a million in duplicate recoveries and $1.75 million in statement recoveries, adding valuable working capital to the business and pinpointing problem areas.
Listen to the interview with Jeff to learn:
- The four-step process to identify duplicate payments and statement credits
- The business case for an objective third-party rolling statement review versus adding headcount for an internal recovery audit
- Common reasons for duplicate and statement recoveries (e.g., no PO, unidentified volume rebates, return credits)
- Expansion of the AP review to other countries and why
- How feedback from the audit is great training material for their AP processing team
Webinar slides: https://bit.ly/2XrQ1uJ
Webinar video: https://www.apexanalytix.com/video-how-general-mills-puts-cash-table-ap-reviews
Speakers:
- Mark Brousseau, President at Brousseau & Associates
- Jeff Heinrich, Senior Global Process Specialist – Accounts Payable and Expense Reporting at General Mills
- Phil Beane, Senior Vice President, Global Field Operations at apexanalytix