Matt Hardwick: Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for the time. I know we have a couple of questions in the chat here that I will answer, or I’ll ask, and hopefully you guys have an answer for. The first one being—this one’s probably a little bit more for Jason—how did your team handle adoption among employees or brands who are used to the old process? And for both of you, any tips for driving that engagement, that change management, that consistency with that new process?
Jason Pierce: Yeah, that’s definitely a challenge, because the optics of automating someone’s role is not great, right? And you’ll find, and we found, that we had pushback as we try to deploy any technology solution or optimization solution.
Specifically in the AP space, we found that we maybe didn’t have people in those seats that were really technically able to work through these processes. And so really we kind of took the approach of automate and consolidate.
And so as we automate AP, we then consolidate that role to our shared services team, which is really an operating model that we ultimately want to get to, where we have a consolidated AP team. And so the automation has allowed us to do that.
And then from the people on site, there’s a plethora of work for them to do. They’ve been helping us with cleaning up our purchasing process, which was a really big deficiency with a lot of our brands. So again, as Paul indicated, we were able to allocate those resources to assist us with more value-add tasks rather than entering bills or data entry.
Paul Barth: And I would add on to that, I think in frameworks sometimes, and from a change management standpoint, change management just needs to be a core competency of an organization in the age of AI. Like, you need to be continuously evolving. And the AI capabilities are changing, it seems like, every week.
But the model that I use, or the framework I use, is what I would call sponsor-agent-target. It’s not mine, but I use it. And for Jason and I to do what we needed to do on this project, we are agents of change. These finance resources do not work for us. They’re in a different part of the organization.
So it requires sponsorship from the executives in our and the target’s organization, and the target in this context would be the people that are doing the work today in the brands and the leadership at those brands. So we need to have sponsorship so that when Jason and I are driving these efforts as agents of change, the targets are aligned to the goals of what we’re trying to achieve.
And without having sponsorship, and without having alignment, it’s going to feel like you’re pushing the river, and it just will not work. So when I think about change management and a framework to get to success, that is essential, and it goes all the way back to some of the things I said when we had those slides up earlier. It is about getting buy-in from the top—priority and engagement.
Matt Hardwick: And could you provide maybe an example of when you have got pushback, how we’ve helped to overcome that, or how us as a group, TurnPoint and Lydonia, have kind of overcome that? Because I know we have run into that, and I think there’s a couple different ways that we’ve gotten around that.
Paul Barth: Man, I can’t think of anything that didn’t go anything other than perfectly smooth, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. No.
Yeah, it looks like an organization moves at the speed of trust, so it really requires you to build a bridge, as an agent of change, to the targets and the leadership there. It is also knowing the limits of what an agent of change can do and looking for those sponsors to step in to emphasize or re-emphasize why.
Always start with why. Simon Sinek wrote a whole book about it. And if we can anchor what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, why it’s better for the brand, for the customer, whatever the target of the change is, getting that alignment—and then if you can get that buy-in, you have that sponsorship.
The rest, then, is working through how. And that—I mean, I don’t want to trivialize the how—that’s still very challenging. But you’re no longer negotiating whether you’re going to do this. It is really agreed that we have to get to success, and now we’re figuring out how do we get there together.
Matt Hardwick: Yeah, so to that end, we just got another question in the chat. How did your team leverage those early wins to build that momentum to expand adoption across the organization, whether that be invoice processing or some of the other wins that we’ve had across the organization?
Jason Pierce: Yeah, so from an invoice processing perspective, we started with our shared services team. And so, you know, our shared services team supports currently 23 of our 60 brands, and so we started this workflow and this automation process with them.
And then as it worked, and as we saw the results, we then could advertise the KPIs to the rest of the organization to say our shared services team of 8 people was able to process 20,000 bills, and of those 20,000 bills, they actually had to touch 2,000 of them.
And so the results really speak for themselves, and as you can provide those case studies to our management team, then they have the confidence to say, you know, this is how we want to go through with this, and we want to deploy this at our other brands.
And so as you see true results and the processes working, that only helps getting the buy-in from leadership and from our local GMs.
Matt Hardwick: Absolutely. And then one last question—actually, we just got another one in here—but this next question is for Jason. Were there any unexpected challenges or roadblocks during the implementation of invoice processing, and how did the team overcome them?
Jason Pierce: Yeah, so the biggest challenge we had as part of the invoice extraction tool is it extracts the vendor name specifically to what the invoice says. That vendor name then has to match exactly to our accounting system, and that was not necessarily the case.
And so we had to basically align our vendor name. We have over 9,000 vendors, so we had to update a lot of vendor names so that the bot was able to read the bill, identify exactly what vendor it’s for, so that it can properly enter it into our systems.
The Lydonia team created summary reports for us to say, here are the vendor names that we’ve extracted from the bills that we’ve consumed. We were unable to find these vendors in your system. And so then we were able to take that summary report, go into our accounting system, and update those vendor names so that the next time that bill was presented to the bot, it was then able to locate that vendor.
That was pretty much our biggest challenge, and that was really vendor data for us, which wasn’t clean. As we buy companies, we basically consume or assume their vendor names, which don’t always align with what’s on the bills.
Matt Hardwick: Right. Yeah, and that goes back to some of the issues with the manual process, right? People are putting in vendor names as they hear them on the phone, or see them online, instead of exactly what’s on that invoice, right? So the process optimization as automation happens is a key point there. So thank you for sharing that.
And then lastly, if you don’t mind sharing, what type of accuracy we’re getting with the GDI? I think someone popped in late and didn’t get those numbers, and what type of ROI are we seeing on the process to this point?
Jason Pierce: So I’ll speak on the accuracy. So I would say 99.9% accuracy. And that’s even with the item descriptions that we put into the bills that the bot processes.
The only issues that we may see, and we work through those, is S’s and 5’s and B’s and 8’s. But again, we’re able to kind of solve for those, as we know that this vendor’s—every one of their bills begins with an S.
But for the most part, we’ve actually got another kind of governance bot that then just double-checks the total that the processing bot enters versus the total that the governance bot sees the bill to be, just so that we know that when that bill gets entered, it’s going to have a double check of the total amount of that bill so that it’s accurate.
And then as far as the ROI, Paul, I don’t know if you want to kind of get into that.
Paul Barth: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. I would say it’s all good news. Every company measures ROI in different ways. Is it in-year? Is it first year? Is it 3-year? Is it 5-year? There’s hard benefits, there’s soft benefits.
So here’s what I would say. The investment that we’re making on a pure cost basis, I think, will pay for itself well ahead of the first year. And then those savings persist forever.
And that doesn’t even speak to the value we’re getting from some of those new capabilities, like the vendor costing piece that wouldn’t have been possible without this project, that I would say we’re not even really capturing what that savings is relative to our initial investment.
So the way I would answer that, it is many multiples of the upfront cost in the first year alone, and then depending upon how you at your company manage your ROI thinking, it only gets better from there. So it’s a very positive ROI.
Matt Hardwick: Understood. I know that was a pretty open-ended question, so thank you for breaking it down like that. That’s super helpful. And that was all the questions we had.
Matt Hardwick: So Paul, Jason, thank you so much for hopping on with me and breaking down really your program at a high level, and also the invoice processing process in general, answering all the questions. You guys have been great partners to Lydonia, and we look forward to doing more and more work with you all in the future.
Jason Pierce: Thank you, Matt.
Paul Barth: Yeah, thank you, Matt. Appreciate it.
Matt Hardwick: Awesome. And thank you to everyone who joined. Bye-bye.
