At the end of each PayStream Summit, we conduct a survey among the attendees on their experience at the event. Their responses help us refine and improve our conference content and presentation for the next year, and we always appreciate the valuable feedback we receive. One the questions we ask pertains to the various guest speakers from the sessions and workshops, and this year, a stand-out speaker who rated highly among attendees’ was the Senior Manager of Purchasing, Planning, and Analysis at Kansas City Southern (KCS), Tiffany Lovelace.

Ms. Lovelace’s presentation was definitely worthy of this recognition—it was dynamic, clean, inspiring, and incredibly valuable. She took us through the history of KCS’ transformation in a simple and informative way, and extracted for her listeners the most important lessons that her department learned during their journey to optimized purchasing—lessons that PayStream will re-share with our readers today.

In 2009, the blow to the American economy did major damage to the country’s businesses, and KCS felt the effects as much as the rest of the corporate world. To deal with lowering revenues and tighter budgets, the company’s departments were forced to reduce their employees and reallocate duties. With the increased volume of POs and purchasing tasks on a smaller staff, compliance issues also increased.

During this time of transition, the weaknesses in KCS’ purchasing procedures began to stand out and cause more harm than ever. Ms. Lovelace identified the key factors that were working against their process: lack of strategic vision, stagnant growth, limited knowledge, restricted use, and lack of management support, to name a few. The purchasing program platform at that time used one general p-card type for all expenses, with an annual volume of 14.9M and 543 active cards. The single transaction limit was $500 and there were tight systemic controls that caused more problems than they prevented.

To remedy this situation, Ms. Lovelace decided to revamp her company processes with an analytics-powered approach—The New Commercial Card Program. This took purchasing procedures managed by systemic and velocity limits/controls to a program managed by spend analysis. The challenges she faced included poor data quality, multiple iterations of reporting platforms, applications, and processes, and no visibility to commercial card data.

The Spend Analysis approach involved setting up validation rules to assure accurate and consistent output, a progressive approach to reporting with pivot tables to multidimensional reports, and matching/fuzzy logic to align entities. Ms. Lovelace and her team also kept their progress in perspective by employing a what-if analysis to determine the savings in processing costs and increased rebates, and by benchmarking their operations against a global classification schema.

With policy reformation, re-engineering program controls, and a robust spend analysis program, KCS saw major decreases in customer wait time and non-PO spend, among other improvements. Ms. Lovelace owes much of this success to a few key strategies and she gave these to her listeners: “Formulate achievable goals for your commercial card program, understand your organization’s culture and limitations, extract and measure insightful data into a sound reporting platform, and leverage the strength and position of your commercial card program.”

Ms. Lovelace chose to give up on a tangled, overburdened program that was damaging the future of her company, and instead moved aggressively towards process efficiency that revitalized her entire organization. PayStream was truly inspired by her calm and confident approach to P2P change, and we are truly grateful to have had Ms. Lovelace join us at INNOVATE 2014.