Next week, PayStream Advisors will be teaming up with Datamatics in a webinar entitled“How a Cloud-Based P2P Solution Cured Our ERP Challenges”. The main purpose of this webinar is to tell a story about a very innovative company that strategically used technology to bring AP transformation. This company’s journey shows the correlation between strong  goals and lasting success, and it also relevant to some of our recent research on how today’s cloud-based technology is curing ERP challenges. We think it is very important that AP and finance professionals learn from that success.

The story that PayStream’s Henry Ijams and Datamatics’ Roshan Halwai will be telling is centered on La Quinta Inns & Suites. One of the leading franchises of select-service hotels, La Quinta operates more than 800 locations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Their company culture is based upon excellence, and they strive to “do ordinary things extraordinarily well”—and challenge the status quo along the way.

This mentality seeps into La Quinta’s accounting goals as well: the company’s AP focus is to make all their processes better, faster, and cheaper and to structure their activity in a way that will consistently support corporate goals. A few years ago, they looked at their AP condition and compared it with their standards for excellence—they saw a lot of room for improvement. They were losing time, money, and security due to their dependence on their existing ERP and its inadequate native business process solutions.

The first step La Quinta took towards change was structuring a plan. Next, they began a search for an appropriate solution provider that could help them migrate from their current in-house applications to versatile cloud-based software. La Quinta eventually turned to Datamatics for a holistic AP solution.

Of course, our readers can probably guess where this story is going. A company with clear goals and a strong desire for change combined with an innovative financial software company—it’s a recipe for success, and success was what it produced.

Attendees of next week’s webinar will hear the full story of how Datamatics was able to ultimately reduce costs, raise visibility, and implement highly customized, cloud-based applications. We will tell you now, however: a great determinant in La Quinta and Datamatics’ success was their careful planning and calculated execution. Join us on November 13^th to find out the specific strategies La Quinta took to formulate and follow an automation plan, and to fill the gaps between process efficiency and inadequate ERP business applications.