FiServ - Financial Shared Services Solution
Simplify. Run digital. - SAP and OpenText

The Industry is Evolving – and Digital Transformation is at the Forefront. Don’t be Left Behind!

On March 25th SSON (Shared Services & Outsourcing Network) hosted an OpenHouse.

SSON is the largest online community (more than 88.000 practitioners) for Shared Services and Outsourcing Professionals (for free). The OpenHouse is based on the findings of SSON Annual Survey and is aligns with our communities most urgent needs – by using case studies they can better understand how in your case OpenText can help them but from a peer – to – peer perspective.
The subscribers/network members of SSON are directly invited to join these OpenHouse webinar session days. Last year over 1000 end users attended the OpenHouses. This OpenText customer session was at 10am GMT on 25th March 2015.

2nd Shared Services & Outsourcing Open House | March 23-26 2015 | www.sharedservicesopenhouse.com

The OpenText session was presented by our customer FiServ, USA. Speaker was Karen Harris, Business Analyst, FiServ and Tom Walker, OpenText USA was her co-host.

The session was presented in the “Leveraging Metrics & Analytics“-Track:

Track: "Metrics & Analytics"

Today, driving better business insights on the basis of data analytics is top of every shared services leader’s list. And with emerging technology turning this data into automated processes, it means your value add increases. As shared services expand beyond country or even regional boundaries to incorporate global processes, the access to enterprise wide data increases exponentially. Today, we are seeing more shared services include a “data analytics” role, as well as a stronger BPO capability in offering data analytics driven services to customers. These sessions on data-driven automation will provide tips on how you can drive improved performance.

Title: "The Industry is Evolving – and Digital Transformation is at the Forefront. Don’t be Left Behind!"

Fiserv is a global provider of financial services technology to finance and insurance institutions as well as retailers, merchants and government agencies. There are 65 major business units located across the US and internationally.
By 2011, all business units had been consolidated on SAP and a Financial Shared Services center was created in Costa Rica for PTP. As part of this transition, Accounts Payable was automated using document imaging and workflow. The imaging solution leveraged Open Text VIM as the foundation tool. Today, an integrated imaging and approval workflow solution provides access to approving managers, accounting, tax and others operating teams.

Find out how Fiserv is reaping the benefits of automated Invoice Processing in this session.

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FiServ Webinar on Demand

Karen Harris

Speaker

Tom Walker

Co-Host

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Interview with Karen Harris

• Introduce yourself.

Sure. My name is Karen Harris and I am from Fiserv Inc. and we are one of the largest providers of financial software to the banking industry, serving banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. My title is Manager of Procure to Pay Global Initiatives. And all of that means basically that my role is to continue to roll out functionality across the enterprise that helps us be more efficient in the P2P space.

• Can you give more information about Fiserv?

Right. So if you are--

• Start over.

Fiserv primarily, okay, that’s not what I wanted to say. If you pay your bills online, then you are using the software that Fiserv provides to the bank. We do online bill payment and presentment.

• Anything else you want to mention about the company? One of the things I’m looking for, I mean, what’s your positioning in the market? What do you think Fiserv stands for if you were to describe that?

So, we are the, Fiserv is the largest provider of financial software to the banking institutions and that software helps them to allow their customers to pay their bills online and to also it helps financial institutions with trading activities and things like that. So, we are the largest provider and we are global around the world. We have offices in most countries.

• Great. And going back in time, what were some of the business drivers that led you to the purchase of Invoice Management?

The business drivers for Fiserv in purchasing Vendor Invoice Management was primarily the fact that we were extremely decentralized. We had a number of business units, 65 plus of them, plus in fact across the world that were using different ERP systems, so the project that we undertook back in 2011 was to centralize our operations into one instance of SAP and then also provide a smooth path for invoice processing and procure to pay activities in that space.

• Great. I’m looking at your one slide where you talked about the challenges, you mentioned the different SAP instances. Do you want to talk about the transformation of accounts payable? What were some of the challenges in accounts payable that led to this?

Oh, okay. We had significant challenges in accounts payable such as the fact that we had many accounts payable departments across the globe. All of them were operating in a different ERP system, and many of the processes were also different. We also were completely paper-based within our organization so that was a significant challenge as well. So, all of those things together also made it a great change management challenge. So, I think the change management challenges were the biggest.

• Can you go over some of the change management challenges?

Sure. So if you can imagine, our change management effort included driving all of these different organizations into one model for accounts payable and procure to pay. And we used Vendor Invoice Management in that way to centralize those operations into one space, but it was also a way for us to show our various business units where to go to get their purchase orders as well as get their invoices paid, approved, and paid.

• Great. When you looked at Vendor Invoice Management, why did you choose VIM over a competitive offering?

Sure. We chose Vendor Invoice Management over other offerings, the primary reason was because it integrated so seamlessly within the SAP space. And we were doing an SAP big bang SAP implementation at the time. So, that was a very, very good positive benefit for us. It’s seamless. It looks very much like SAP. And it helped us to be able to train our end users to utilize the tool Vendor Invoice Management as well as SAP at the same time.

• Great. And so going into the current situation, so what would you say are – how is Vendor Invoice Management used today and what do you look at as those successes of the solutions?

So, there are many successes that we have experienced using Vendor Invoice Management. The first one was the centralization within shared services environment. And our shared services team, organizing the team within the vendor tool. So, the Vendor Invoice Management tool actually drove that organizational model in that it was easy for us to explain that invoice documents would come in, first stop indexing or identifying the invoice with the appropriate information, and then also the exception handling approach. We were able to use the VIM model to drive the organizational structure.

• Great. So, what have some of the results been with the increase in efficiency? For instance, were you able to redeploy some of your team members to other areas because you’re now able to process invoices more efficiently?

We were able to redeploy a lot of our resources to more beneficial activities within the business units by centralizing into a shared services model. So, that was very, very helpful to us. Although, our business unit resources still participate in the process and VIM helps us by having a central location where everyone can go to see the same information.

• Great. And what about the scope of your AP operations? If we can get some numbers of just, you know, how many invoices do you process per year for example? And maybe how many processors you had for VIM versus today?

Sure. So, prior to our implementation of Vendor Invoice Management, we had over 200 accounts payable processors across the globe. We now have in our shared service center only 64 processors and those people are dispersed between several activities. Those activities would be partially procurement, where they’re looking at goods, receipts, and purchase orders. Also invoice processing where we have a team of indexers, ten indexers, as well as AP processors as well.

And then we have two help desks, one for procurement activities, and one for payment activities.

• And number of invoices?

We process about 150,000 invoices a year. That’s a small number for an organization of our size. However, our invoices are large invoices. The line items that are included on those invoices are large as we have a number of large suppliers that invoice us quite a bit.

• Great. Would you be willing to go over what you look at as the specific AP productivity improvements? What was the time to process an invoice? Do you have numbers on how long it took before versus today?

So, prior to the implementation of VIM there was a significant amount of time utilized to paying an invoice. We recognized as an organization that we were not always paying our suppliers on time. The biggest roadblock to on time payment was the fact that our invoices were going to many offices across the enterprise and we were dependent on those locations to funnel invoices to the appropriate places. Also, we had a lot of manual approval activities. And as you can imagine, waiting for someone to sign off physically on an invoice and actually not knowing where that invoice is in the process would add to the time getting to the payment. So, as we implemented the Vendor Invoice Management tool, we were able to consolidate the path for invoices into one space, so invoices funnel directly into the tool and we are able to monitor the processing of that document from the start, from receipt, all the way through payment.

We also got a handle on our approvers by using the VIM tool in that they go to a single location, automated approval processing, and we’re able to monitor those that are not approving on time.

• Great. And so going along with that you’re able to look at the process overall, so you’re able to get a better overview of where bottlenecks are happening and you’re able to kind of constantly fine tune?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, using the tool we’re able to monitor productivity of our shared service team as well as all of the other agents that are included in our workflow. So, we have included for instance the tax department. Fixed assets has a role. As well as our AP processors for exception handling. We’re able to see where that invoice is in the process at any moment in time, so visibility into the accounts payable processing was a big benefit for our organization.

• Terrific. And what about supplier relations? Are you able to take advantage of supplier discounts?

Sure. Certainly our supplier relationships improved significantly just by centralizing our operation. Our suppliers were being paid more timely. But also they, too, are able to query our help desk and get an understanding about where their invoices are. Also, along with our implementation of VIM, we asked our suppliers to begin using more purchase orders or accepting our purchase orders for our payments and including that information on the invoices which was not a consistent practice prior to VIM.

• That’s terrific. Maybe some comments about – you talked about the volume of paper, the copies that you found to be – just keeping copies everywhere. And then also about the ability to digitize the electronic invoice receipts.
Yes. I guess digitizing all of the – getting paper out of the system all together, or out of the equation all together.

Yes. So one of the biggest challenges we had to implementing the VIM tool was to locate the paper throughout our organization. We did a survey of our business departments just to get an understanding of how they were utilizing the invoice documents that were coming in to the accounts payable environment. And what we found was very interesting. We found that on average an invoice within our organization was copied two to three times, once by accounts payable, once by the individual departments such as marketing, fixed assets, accounting, taxes, and also by our audit team who made a copy of those documents as they went from office to office, auditing those particular business units.

One other benefit that was one that we didn’t anticipate as a part of implementing VIM, our audit team was very happy because centralizing the images into one location that they could easily access saved them a lot of money in terms of travel costs, whereas prior they had to travel around to every office in order to see those documents. They were now able to stay in their home office and actually audit those business units from the VIM instance.

• Great. That’s perfect. The other one is, my question would be have you been able to for non-paper format documents, are you able to see the documents – how do you view the documents even though they came in electronically?

Right. Okay, you want to hear about the virtual image that we created using the VIM tool? Right. Okay, so another benefit to the imaging portion of the VIM tool, we were able to actually provide a visual depiction of our electronic invoices. We found that our end users were uncomfortable without being able to see something visually, so for all of our electronic invoices that are coming in, we pass them through the VIM tool and create a virtual image as we call it where we take the metadata that’s coming in electronically, spray it on to a form, and actually provide something visual for our end users to view. And that was part of the Vendor Invoice Management delivery.

• Great. What about OCR? Do you want to talk about--

Yes. So currently in our environment we do not have our OCR tool implemented. That is a planned project for 2015. In our initial implementation we rolled out the VIM tool without OCR and that was just a simple decision by our organization because of the large project that we were currently involved in, implementing SAP and the VIM tool, something had to go. So, unfortunately at that moment it happened to be the OCR piece.

However, we’re really excited about extending that OCR piece into our VIM environment in 2015. We will be implementing ICC 7.5 I believe.

• Great. That’s one of the next steps you have. Any other next steps you have in terms of Open Text technology or any big plans for the next year, next two years for what you want to do next?

In the next two years we have a number of plans for extending our Vendor Invoice Management tool into our organization. Our initial implementation covered us domestically in the US, the Americas, and Canada. So, in 2015 we will be extending the VIM environment into Europe and into India. We plan to establish a second shared services environment in our India office that will service Europe, Asia Pac, and India.

And that implementation will include the ICC tool as well.

• Great. What have been your experiences working with Open Text? What would you say about your dealings with Open Text and working with Open Text? Any comments in general about how you view Open Text? Do you view it as a partnership? I mean, what’s your thoughts on that?