Tag Archives: Henry Ijams

Upcoming Webinar: PayStream and Basware on Global eInvoicing

This Thursday (December 11^th), we’ve got an exciting webinar planned for AP and P2P professionals—especially those from companies that are looking to expand their B2B scope past their national borders. For our recent 2014 Global eInvoicing report, PayStream spent quite some time investigating the current trends and recent developments in eInvoicing around the world. Our main goal with this research (and this webinar!) is to provide North American companies with the proper insight and tools to join a global business arena.

For this webinar, we will team up with the global eInvoicing provider, Basware, and their Vice President of North American operations, Bob Cohen, to discuss the findings of the PayStream’s 2014 Global eInvoicing Report. In the report, research reveals differing adoption rates in different regions and countries, as well as how North American eInvoicing stands up next to its neighbors, near and far. We’ve found that Europe and Latin America show the most advanced eInvoicing networks and the most widespread B2B eInvoicing usage, although interest in eInvoicing network participation is growing among North American businesses. In addition, we’ve identified some major drivers for global eInvoicing adoption initiatives that include the Public Sector, SME involvement, and Supply Chain Financing.

We believe this information is very important for companies interested in gearing their business operations towards international activity. Globalization is expanding, speeding up, and dramatically changing trade all around the world, and in response, eInvoicing solution providers are focusing their development strategies on cross-border B2B functionalities. With this shifting attitude toward global business, it is important for North American companies to learn from successful international organizations, and rise to meet the changing B2B world. Webinar attendees will be given valuable tools for choosing a globally focused solution that will bring security and competency to international trade activity.

This webinar is for companies that are tired of sitting on the sidelines as the rest of the world expands their business operations and advances their business technology. Together, PayStream and Basware will provide the information and incentives necessary to push these companies across their borders and into global innovation. Join us this Thursday, December 11^th, for the Global eInvoicing webinar, and learn how to prepare your organization for a broader business future.

PayStream’s Henry Ijams to Add His Voice at Money 20/20

Exciting news: PayStream’s own P2P guru, Henry Ijams, will be acting as moderator on
a special panel discussion at this year’s Money 20/20. This session, “New Approaches to Invoicing, Billing & Payment,” will take place on Wednesday, November. 5^th,. Henry will be joined by several other leaders in the finance, procurement, and IT industry, including Eyal Shinar, the CEO & Founder of Fundbox, Mike Praeger, Co-Founder & CEO, AvidXchange, Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, and Dave Dutch, CEO of PayLease.

Money 2/20, one of the largest financial technology conferences in the world, certainly has no shortage of P2P innovators—they report more than 7500 attendees, including over 750 CEOs from more than 60 countries. Held in Las Vegas, this conference focuses on the latest innovations in business process technology and best practices, and it is an informative and memorable event in which PayStream is always proud to take part.

Wednesday’s session will be centered on a subtle but powerful revolution happening in back offices throughout the business world. New developments and strategies—much of them from the companies of the panel participants—are making invoicing and payments more efficient, benefitting both buyers and sellers, and ensuring that the data necessary to approve invoices and apply payments is timely and accurate. This session’s panelists will give their listeners their own experiences and techniques in challenging the status quo of financial process automation.

PayStream has seen some of these new strategies and B2B best practices in our own recent research, including new ways to structure invoice approvals, simpler approaches to eliminating paper, and insights into navigating today’s ERPs. We are very excited Henry is able to add his own extensive AP and P2P knowledge at such an important event as Money 20/20. We encourage any of our readers that are attending the conference—especially those in the technology, investment, and banking industries—to catch the “New Approaches to Invoicing, Billing & Payment” panel discussion on Wednesday, Nov. 5^th, from 3:40 – 4:25pm in Juniper 2, Level 3.

PayStream Webinar: Home Depot’s Value Creation Story

In the PayStream Advisor webinar last week, we heard an amazing story on AP and P2P transformation from Debbie Rich-Walker, the Senior Finance Manager at the world’s largest home booru-author-e1388777078218 improvement retailer, Home Depot. Ms. Rich-Walker, who will also be a speaker at our Innovate 2014 P2P Summit this September, is a natural and dynamic leader, and with her guidance, Home Depot became a transformative player in the P2P world. In the webinar, Ms. Rich-Walker was joined by PayStream’s Henry Ijams and Direct Commerce Founder and President, Bruce Hanavan, and together they showed us the power of innovative and driven collaboration. We are happy to share the Home Depot Value Creation Story again with you today.

Although the results have been tremendous, Ms. Rich-Walker admits the change to complete automated processing was a difficult and sometimes exhausting journey. Home Depot is an enormous company with 40 million AP transactions and $50 million in direct spend a year. For such a big operation, it was difficult to drive change, but the intense pains of the company’s manual methods far outweighed the effort of transition. In Home Depot’s old paper-process, discrepancies included problems with cycles, suppliers sending duplicate flyers and consequential duplicate payments. They processed over 5 million pieces of paper a year, and while invoices made up a big part of that paper volume, a large amount was also being used in conflict resolution. With an enormous number of supplier calls to the department’s help desk, Ms. Rich-Walker’s staff was spending most of their time smoothing over problems in their supplier relationships.

Home Depot took charge of their messy situation by partnering with the solution provider, Direct direct Commerce. They began their automation journey with a self-service portal where Home Depot vendors could file issues and complaints. This portal turned out to be the game changer, and the foundation of Home Depot’s Value Creation Story. Ms. Rich-Walker said that the portal’s initial purpose was to be a dispute management center to relieve the pressure from her staff, but once they recognized its value, they rebranded it as a supplier self-service center, turning it into a one-stop shop for their vendors. It phased out Home Depot’s help-desk, eliminating the constant calls and time needed to handle problems. Additionally, the portal enables Home Depot to track the process of invoices and other documents, record suppliers’ concerns, and manage cash effectively. Today, the company spends 40% less on their processing costs, and they can now gain capital through early payments discount. With such a huge organization, a 40% cost reduction means millions of dollars in savings.

Concerning his work with Ms. Rich-Walker, Bruce Hanavon said she was a real front-runner in the transformation process. Direct Commerce collaborated with Home Depot to create the right program criteria that would build success early on, and Ms. Rich-Walker took advantage of all Direct Commerce had to offer by leveraging the self-service portal as an enabler for additional process improvements—which really gave them their business leap. When customizing the solution, the AP and procurement departments partnered with treasury staff to support an optimized financial strategy that increased savings, making their process a treasury creation instead of simply an AP creation, and when making the transition, Ms. Rich-Walker’s department surveyed their suppliers to get their feedback. Ms. Rich-Walker believes the company was successful in implementation because they involved the supplier in this way, making the self-service portal collaborative and personal from the ground up.

The complete transition took Home Depot five years to complete, but they made it through the rougher patches by maintaining goals and objectives—a critical practice for driving success—and by remaining flexible. Each step they took brought astronomical ROIs, as well as fantastic supplier relationships, and today they have reached what seems like an impossible goal: a 100% paper-less process. Ms. Rich-Walker wants AP and financial professionals to know that this goal—the holy grail of automation—is possible and maintainable with the right sustainability practices. These practices include finding the right people, the right process, and the right technology.

Ms. Rich-Walker will be joining PayStream for our annual conference, Innovate 2014 Purchase to Pay Summit, held in San Antonia, Texas, this September at the Hyatt Regency Riverwalk. This exciting conference will feature 18 case study workshops facilitated home_night_banner by leaders—like Debbie Rich-Walker—at the most innovative organizations. This is a great opportunity for finance professionals to learn more about process improvements, and to network with their peers in AP, Procurement, Finance, and the Supply Chain. Join us in September—we would love to see you!

A Big Question: Is AP Pushing the Dirty Work Onto AR?

Last week, PayStream Advisors hosted a special webinar that explored the not-so-pleasant effects of AP automation by asking this question: is AP pushing the dirty work onto AR? Along with Henry Billtrust’s SVP of marketing, Mitch Rose, Henry Ijams led attendees through some of the top industry challenges and process bottlenecks, showing how an efficient accounts payable department can sometimes cause inefficiency in the accounts receivable department.

Henry and Mitch explained the ‘dirty work’ in a nutshell: by automating their process, AP is throwing more work at AR, creating significant inefficiencies in the AR process. With their changes towards electronic processing, AP departments are requiring their counterpart to also change, and when AR fails do so at the same rate, trouble begins. As they embrace more technology, AP departments are requesting more ways to receive bills, asking for more bills to be sent directly to AP systems, making payments through multiple channels, and sending “de-coupled” (naked) payments. For AR departments that are not up to date with the various automation solutions, these desires from AP are impacting efficiency, costs, payment times, and ultimately, AR performance.

From an AP perspective, automation is not a passing trend—it is the future of business processing. AP wants straight-through processing and they don’t want to deal with paper any longer—whether in the invoicing or the payment process. Check use for business payments is falling across the globe, and the use of electronic payments is increasing due to its benefits of savings, improved cash forecasting, and fraud control. One of the most popular methods of ePayment is electronic funds transfer (EFT). This method saves money and time, but it has challenges, especially for AR. Buyers have to maintain supplier bank details on their vender master records and suppliers find reconciliation difficult due to remittance information being sent separately from the payment. The processing of these de-coupled payments can be expensive for AR—the average processing cost is $9.79.

PayStream’s research shows that AP automation is growing in adoption by companies of all sizes. The inevitability of the situation is something that many AR managers must simply accept. However, bill management is the 2nd largest controllable expense of AR departments, and this trend towards AP automation might actually be the chance for AR managers to lower their operating expenses. If AR can grab this opportunity and adopt electronic processing themselves, the result will be greater savings and a greater ability to satisfy the AP needs of their customers.

How can AR departments do this? It is important for AR to understand a few things, starting with their customer’s expectations—all sized companies want efficiency and they want an easy way to do business with their suppliers. To meet these expectations, AR can provide their customers with choices, including different options for payment. By offering their customers many choices, they can take an active role in driving electronic billing.

To offer these choices, it is imperative that AR integrates with AP systems. There are many solutions that enable this integration, and providers are building these solutions with greater consideration of AR needs than ever before. There are common features that solutions offer, such as the use of easy and accessible collaborative portals that require varying factors of data and navigation. Automation solutions can also create cash application efficiency by accepting de-coupled payments.

Billtrust is one company that integrates AR with AP by building a relationship between the supplier and buyer on the AP System. Through their platform, invoice data is sent to Billtrust and then distributed to the appropriate system, sending alerts from AP directly to the supplier. Billtrust provides a range of paper and electronic invoice presentment channels and they are able to integrate into leading AP systems such as Ariba, OB10, Avid Xchange. They have best-in-breed integrated presentment and payment portals and they support linkage with Open Scan to support Cash Application across payment methods. Using a solution provider like Billtrust is a huge, proactive way that AR departments can take charge of the changes in business processing—instead of being stuck in a ‘dirty’ and complicated situation.

Ultimately, technology saves money and creates accuracy. Despite the difficulties that can come with it for AR departments, automated processing is here to stay. However, instead of looking at the negative effects this disconnect between AP and AR can cause, AR can take this chance to move towards change. The dirty work shows up when AP throws more work at AR, but instead of seeing resulting inefficiencies, AR departments can use this mess as the inspiration to create significant change and efficiency in the AR process.

About Henry Ijams:
Mr. Ijams’ 28 years of experience focuses on trends and technologies in financial operations automation including strategies regarding the automation and benchmarking of Purchasing and Payables processes. Through PayStream Advisors, Mr. Ijams consults with domestic and international organizations that want to take advantage of leading practices and automation solutions.

About Mitch Rose:
Mr. Rose is responsible for the branding, lead generation and product marketing activity at Billtrust. Through the course of Mitch’s professional career he has created breakthrough marketing campaigns, battled off major competitive threats, and led teams in the development of industry leading new products.

Paperless AP in 90 Days: The Road to AP Serenity Starts Here

PayStream Advisors and Recall Document Solutions teamed up this Thursday for the PayStream webinar, “Paperless AP in 90 Days: The Road to AP Serenity Starts Here.” The webinar had a great turnout with over 150 AP professionals attending the meeting. Our very own AP guru, Henry Ijams, and Jason Ernst, AP expert from Recall, hosted the webinar. They generously offered valuable information into the process of eliminating paper in an AP department, as well as to how a professional can be a leader and affect change in their company.

In the webinar, Jason gives an example of an innovative enterprise with a sample case-study. Hypothetical sales company, ACME Catalog, processed 4,000 invoices per month, had 8 staff in AP, and issued 3,200 checks per month. In an effort to make their AP department more efficient, ACME went to a third party partner and got paperless invoicing in only 90 days by way of intelligently capturing incoming invoices.

This 90 day implementation is a common duration for Recall, which specializes in document management solutions like mailroom services. Jason is an advocate for the process ACME utilized, believing that scanning has much more importance than organizations realize with its tremendous benefits and instant visibility. Using managed invoice services to get rid of paper invoices allows more focus on value added work, improves the invoice process, adds greater scalability to scanning processes, and adopts best practices in capture and validation.

What sort of professional takes this information and turns it into change in their company? Henry says, the AP Innovator. The Innovator sees the need for a long term transformation plan, cohesive coalition, and a metric to define success. The Innovator also looks at the big picture, realizing the importance of measuring how well the invoice moves through an entire organization rather than only through the AP department.

Henry gives the audience several questions to ask themselves and their departments when considering AP automation and their company. One of the first things a professional needs to know is the level of maturity within their AP department. They can measure their company in terms of the three steps to AP maturity: Efficiency, Entry, and Collaborative Commerce.

For companies entering the Efficiency stage , there will likely meet many barriers along the way. These barriers take form in many common fears against AP automation- such as a fear that there will not be a ROI. However, Henry and Jason thoroughly illustrate that not only will there be a ROI from automation, there will also be numerous other benefits to a company’s efficiency and labor management.

However, before these benefits are realized, AP professionals have to recognize their potential as leaders in the workplace. When they begin to do that, they can continue to the Entry stage. The most important action at the Entry stage is to find out what needs to be done to keep the project moving. Jason says this always starts with considering the audience. Most of the time, to begin a conversation about automation, an AP professional will want to stress the benefits of an automated process by pointing out what it can do for the organization. Usually, these benefits will be ROI, insight, accuracy, audit/compliance ease, and mobility.

The Entry stage is also the stage for a professional to define the scope of their project. They should outline the benefits with peer benchmarking, statements of the problems and objectives, delineation of steps and goals, and then, the measurement of a few good items that are stimulus for change. This last step leads straight into the third stage: Collaborative Commerce.

At this stage, Jason says, it is important for an AP innovator to be prepared by diagnosing their organization’s pains to build their business case. This level of the process is in large part a numbers game, as it is all about gaining executive buy-in. AP professionals should analyze their company’s own options and check their savings based on their company specifics. When reporting that automation can reduce AP labor requirements, they will want to point out the possibility for allocation of labor to other, more strategic departments like marketing. When showing how much a paper-less process can save their organization, they’ll want to carefully calculate the savings based on their company’s own data- which anyone can do for free using PayStream’s Cost Per Invoice Calculator. Henry stresses, to overcome obstacles in the way of a professional becoming a leader, they must realize that it’s up to them to show organizations what they need to do.

What was the biggest message that Jason Ernst with Recall and Henry Ijams from PayStream wanted their attendees to take from Thursday’s successful and informative webinar? A working professional can be a leader to drive success; they have the power to lead their company forward and achieve AP efficiency.

About Jason Ernst:
Jason has been in the document solutions industry for the last 10 years. He brings a wealth of practical advice based on his first hand interactions with a wide variety of organizations and business leaders throughout North America.

Tweets