Awards2017

AP Team of the Year

AP Manager of the Year

Outstanding Contribution to AP of the Year

Innovation in Supporting the Business

Purchase to Pay

Award sponsors

Tradeshift is a flexible business commerce platform where companies can buy, sell, and tailor B2B solutions to meet their needs. We enable customers to digitize multiple supply chain processes, information and collaboration. Our solutions include procure-to-pay, supplier engagement and financial solutions. Our extensible cloud platform allows you to tailor solutions to meet your company‘s needs. Tradeshift connects 1.5 million companies across 190 countries and will see $500 billion dollars in transacted value across the platform by the end of 2017.

Basware provides open, secure, cloud-based purchase-to-pay and e-invoicing solutions to organisations of all sizes, resulting in greater efficiencies in procurement, accounts payable and accounts receivable. Companies across all industries, from small businesses to corporate giants use Basware solutions to drive sustainable cost savings, proactive insight to cash flows and improved buyer–supplier relationships. The Basware Commerce Network is founded on the principles of openness, where all types of organisation can collaborate and trade, making it the largest in the world. Today we connect millions of business users in 900,000 companies across over 100 countries. Basware is the global leader in providing solutions for better buying, better selling and connected commerce.

FISCAL Technologies is the leading provider of forensic solutions that empower purchase-to-pay teams across the globe to protect organisational spend. Incorporating unique technology to reduce risk in the supply chain, FISCAL solutions are used on a continuous, preventative basis to protect supplier spend, defend against fraud, increase profitability and drive process improvement. Since 2003, FISCAL has safeguarded hundreds of millions of payments and is now relied on by over 250 leading organisations.

ITESOFT are a multi–award winning international software vendor with an ambition to help their clients reduce costs by streamlining and automating their manual document–centric processes. These market leading solutions are used in 22 countries world-wide and automatically process in excess of 1 billion documents every year in an accurate, fast and effective manner. ITESOFT’s Financial Process Automation software adds value and integrates seamlessly with all the leading Finance and ERP systems available today. Utilising the latest technology the aim is to streamline financial processes and optimise cash flow: process receivables faster and benefit from improved visibility, take advantage of early payment discounts and eliminate late payment penalties.

Welcome

PPN® LtdBuilding 173Curie AvenueHarwell Science and Innovation CampusDidcotOxon OX11 0QGUnited KingdomTel. 0844 870 0508

Since we started looking for excellence in the industry for these awards, we have been overwhelmed with the number and quality of nominations from across the country.

When a team works well together, they can produce outstanding results, and the best teams achieve that in a way that’s supportive, communicative and highly regarded. At PPN we know that every individual within a team has a part to play in the overall success of the department and in delivering success to the business.

These awards make sure those achievements are recognised. Staying ahead of the game in a challenging and complex environment demands focus and determination.

Narrowing the nominations down to the final eight was a very difficult task indeed, and I’d like to thank our judges for the time and consideration involved in coming to a final decision.

Nominations for the next awards will open from October 2017 and we look forward to hearing all the new and exciting ways organisations are meeting and beating challenges.

And so the winners of this year’s awards are…

Ellen LeithEditorwww.p2pnetwork.org@P2Pnetwrk

#PPNAwards

AP Team of the Year

The Accounts Payable team is part of a larger P2P team at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CMFT) consisting of 16 members of staff. The team process approximately 150,000 invoices a year worth £554m. Over 96% of these invoices were paid within the Trust’s standard terms of 30 days, an increase from 47% in previous years. The team also pay other NHS areas and University organisations, matching from PO. In line with Government guidelines, the AP team are also able to pay 87% of SME suppliers within 10 days. For an NHS organisation to turnaround that many invoices so quickly is very impressive.

The AP team have very close relationships with all areas of the P2P team, throughout the Trust and the wider NHS as a whole. Communication within the Trust is vital as is being able to deliver the service, make payment deadlines and achieve savings. Before AP joined with P2P, a number of issues used to occur such as medical deliveries not coming into the Trust due to accounts being on stop owing to late payment. This can have a significant impact on a hospital and can lead to cancelled operations and appointments. With increased automation and improved procedures within the AP department, no accounts go on hold and all suppliers are advised if there is a query with their invoice and why it might not be paid on time.

A number of trusts have visited the department to view the excellent work and to share knowledge throughout the NHS. These include visits from major trusts such as UCLH, Leeds Teaching, Sheffield Teaching and University Hospitals Birmingham.

One of the main successes of the department is in their development of people and careers in finance, with a number of team members progressing via AAT onto higher qualifications such as CIMA. The team have recently welcomed an apprentice into the department and continue to support the Pre-Employment Trainee scheme for the long term unemployed. A number of staff have been promoted both internally to Management Accounts and other NHS organisations.

CMFT Team accepting their award- sponsored by Tradeshift

Peter Loughlin, Managing Editor, Purchasing Insight, has recently written on NHS Procurement and said. “What is most impressive of all is the culture within the Trust. The synergy between AP and Procurement is as good as it gets – it’s all part of the same team. Personal devel-opment is high on the agenda, people are motivated, people are proud. Suppliers like dealing with Manchester, it puts them in an enviable negotiating position.”

Pete added; “I evangelise this kind of stuff, I preach synergy and collaboration because I have seen them all work well, but I have never seen them all in one place before. Well done Manchester, World Class P2P”.

The team have been instrumental in developing P2P practices and are heavily involved in sharing best practice across the whole NHS.

When e-invoicing was introduced, the Trust was set-up as a reference site for the NHS, to help with e-invoicing adoption and provide guidance. All invoices have a 3 way match before payment approval and the information obtained allows the purchasing team increased negotia-tion power when meeting with suppliers. Also owing to the efficiency of the AP function, the team made a saving of £200k in prompt payment discounts.

The Winners

Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

AP Team of the Year

The Guinness Partnership Accounts Payable Team have had to make savings from their existing resources and have had to be creative. Their idea was to create storyboards which detailed failures and control points. The whole team were involved with this and worked with key stakeholders including the Finance Director and other senior executives.

Achievements included 95% of invoices being paid to 30 days, potential duplicates to the value of £1.5m high-lighted and prevented prior to payment and FTE reduc-tion resulting in savings of £112,000. The auto-match rate improved by 9% without any system enhancements. Supplier and customer query resolution within 24 hour SLA at 97% all year.

The team collaborate in several ways, ensuring they use the cross skills matrix and that they are all at 70% of the roles contained within it so there are no single points of failure across the department. They all take part in a monthly Finance team meeting, coming up with innovative ways to demonstrate what they do day to day e.g. creating trees with the leaves displaying their achievements. They take an active interest in their own development freeing up the scanning room on a Friday to give 2 people at a time, the chance to develop them-selves using CBTs, e-Learning and the opportunity to put learning into “active” practice. Some of the team have embarked on studying for the ACCA Global Business Services Certificate as an alternative to the usual accountancy qualifications

The team are rewarded for their efforts by being given incentives such as “golden tickets” which allows them to take time off for important life events – sports days, school plays etc.

Diane Bamford, The Guinness Partnership accepting the team’s award- sponsored by Tradeshift

2nd Place Winners

The Guinness Partnership

AP Manager of the Year

Annette Watkis, Network Homes accepting her award - sponsored by Basware

Annette has worked her way up to the position of AP Manager over the course of a 20 year career, starting as a filing assistant. She set her sights on the position and despite an initial set back, persevered with her personal skills improvement and process-ing knowledge, and when the opportunity became available again, she was successful.

Back in 2015 the AP team was identified as underper-forming. Annette was subsequently made the manager and had the task of transitioning members of the old team into a new cohesive department, ensuring skills were transferred where needed. She then set about re-cruiting a resourceful, focused team, while ensuring that the existing members were supported and driven.

Annette was tasked along with her colleagues to retrain 400 users on the procure to pay process and increased internal communications within the business, including monthly business partnering meetings. This has led to personal thanks from the executive board.

She has faced significant challenges in the last year but has continued to strive and succeed. She has created an amazing team that has bonded in a very short time amid significant pressure. Annette’s results speak volumes of her commitment and passion to the Accounts Payable industry and her journey, commitment, passion, appetite, vigour and success deserves to be celebrated, championed and awarded.

Some of her successes include a backlog of 6000 unpro-cessed invoices being cleared and stringent targets are now in place to ensure efficient processing. Processing times leapt from 60% in 30 days in June 2016, to 81% as at February this year. Other successes include:

• Introduction of a centralised mailbox to increase visibility and a clear audit trail alongside a tracker to monitor set-up of new suppliers.

The Winner

Network Homes, Finance Director said “The Accounts Payable team has done the impossible in a magnificent turnaround.”

• Maximising usage of the duplicate detection software to ensure it was used correctly.

• A debt recovery module to duplicate detection software that found 300k of possible duplicates over the last 3 years so far.

All the above has led to personal thanks and compli-ments from the Executive board, directly to the team and Heads of Department. This led to the team winning a customer service award in the week of customer service and Network Pride Award in 2016.

Annette Watkis, Network Homes

AP Manager of the Year

Kerry Scott, University of Edinburgh accepting her award - sponsored by Basware

Kerry Scott is someone who’s shown exceptional determination and skill in pushing a previously underperforming AP function forward and shown excellence in terms of staff engagement, leadership, customer service training and education. Under her tenure averaging processing times have been reduced to 21 days.

They have implemented a series of focus weeks, includ-ing a fraud awareness week and a customer service week. On top of that, there’s been an increase in customer satisfaction to over 82%. But she’s is not happy to rest on her laurels – next in the plan is e-invoicing, and workflow process improvement.

Over the last few years AP staffing has changed dramati-cally through a mixture of performance management, staff training and recruitment of new staff. Kerry has been particularly strong on managing staff through a period of change, upskilling where needed, being firm if appropriate and mentoring when required.

Kerry also supports the wider finance team by participating fully when needed. She is currently working on service excellence improvements to deliver enhance-ments to the P2P processes. She works particularly closely with colleagues in the Helpdesk and Business Improvements team to deliver system changes e.g. workflows, e-invoicing, supplier self-service which are examples of recent process improvements delivered in the P2P area.

2nd Place Winner

Kerry Scott, University of Edinburgh

The Carlyle Group Team accepting their award - sponsored by Itesoft

The team consists of a group of leaders in AP whose individual skills combine to produce excellence in the field of accounts payable – to the demonstrable benefit to the bottom line of their organisation. As a team they control the AP process of 23 different business entities across EMEA. They had a vision of how the process should work, and went to great lengths to brainstorm better management of several AP tasks with the rest of the business.

This resulted in tasks which previously took two or three full days, being reduced to only an hour. In this time, the team moved away from paper and towards einvoicing. The various changes were achieved by a collaborative ap-proach between the manager and the rest of the team, with members working in rotation so that each had knowledge of the other areas, meaning the learning and knowledge of the AP department is greater than the sum of its parts. This had the unexpected result of increasing communication within the team and across the business.

The team have produced savings and protection from fraud by identifying duplicates and new compliance restrictions around master supplier data. By having a new internally developed vendor portal system, the team can now track all new supplier and modification re-quests. It also allowed for compliance to check any major changes to a vendor, such as a change in name or office move to another country. There is better accountability, workflow, and approval segregation to allow for a more compliant, risk free process, adaptable to international requirements.

Since the portal was rolled out in early 2016, the team saw a decrease in duplicate vendors, and are better guarded against potential fraud. Internal and external auditors can comfortably track all changes. It has been one of the team’s biggest projects and working with teams globally in order to make this happen, has made a big difference with building relationships as well as better safe guarding of the system.

The EMEA Corporate Accounting meet each quarter, providing an opportunity for management to talk through various things such as, budget, company news and volunteering. Winners of the Process Improvement Award are also announced. The award recognises an individual or team who have improved a process using their initiative and skills to make small changes that have bigger impacts.

Having an opportunity to improve team working within the sub teams led to a number of initiatives and activities. The three sub teams in London are, Accounts Payable, Payroll and Reporting, and they strive to work and communicate well with each other. However due to the nature of the work of each sub team, this was not always the case. This was something they wanted to fix.

To improve communication between sub teams, from January this year a few individuals from each team formed a social committee which planned used more relaxed monthly team get-togethers to encourage everyone to interact. This included a cocktail making class, a March Madness basketball challenge, coffee mornings, and after work drinks for example. This led to everyone coming together to make a more united team.

Team and personal goals are set which are recorded through an internal system. Within it they can track goals with a series of written updates and also view and adjust progress. The team also have monthly updates for team and personal goals and hope that in the future they can continue to strive and improve.

The Winners

The Carlyle Group

Outstanding Contribution to AP of the Year

Outstanding Contribution to AP of the Year

Katrina Moore accepting the team’s award - sponsored by Itesoft

Accounts Payable Adecco UK and Ireland have been able to achieve what many have been trying to do over the last few years – doing more with less.

Their AP team has reduced in size from 11 to 5 people in the last three years and by using the limited tools at their disposal, have managed to increase accuracy from 40% to over 95% within a year. The team are proactive in their problem solving, and make efforts to share best practice. The team have been described as one that truly cares for each other and who strive to produce their best – day in, day out.

The team’s debit balance provision is under 3k and this is considered world class given the volume of invoices processed. The team indexed and coded 32,000 invoices in 2016 and they maintain an accuracy over 98%.

They have also introduced a work flow tool which has enabled the team to drill down and focus on problem suppliers.

2nd Place Winners

Adecco UK and Ireland

Innovation in Supporting the Business

City Procurement is a centralised team responsi-ble for the full procure-to-pay (P2P) process for 18 vastly different departments including the Barbi-can Centre, the City of London Police, the Mansion House and Tower Bridge. The AP team process 100,000 invoices a year and pays £460m to trade and non-trade suppliers.

Their strategic aim was to achieve operational excellence with a focus on intelligent data analysis. They created a monthly dashboard which included all the relevant management information. The team operate in a very centralised way with responsibility across the whole of purchase to pay. The dashboard provides headline stats at a glance, meaning that the organisation has full visibility across the different functions and entities.

The team identified that only a few basic AP metrics were being reported so crucially – they started at the right place by asking “what do we need to measure and why do we want to measure it?” The dashboard took over six months of tweaking to create, but the time and energy spent upfront reaped excellent benefits for the organisation. In fact, it’s been recognised as a transfer-able business tool.

Following on from the introduction of a Human Resources Microsoft Excel dashboard, AP developed their own version of an Excel dashboard that showed the statistics vital not only to the success of the AP function but also for the whole organisation to deliver against AP targets. This enabled the AP team to gain greater insight into the component parts of AP performance and to provide improved support to the departments it serves by being able to accurately report on their performance in such areas as Purchase Order Compliance or Payment Performance.

The AP Dashboard also had a wider effect in supporting the business at the City Corporation as it is now being used as a model for developing dashboards across various teams.

The City Procurement Team accepting their award - sponsored by FISCAL Technologies

The team recognised that while AP had developed some monthly reports to track performance, they regularly ended up doing a variety of ad hoc reports as they did not have the management information readily available. Typically this happened when a department requested figures on a particular aspect of their performance at one of the regular working groups.

The AP Dashboard project has been recognised as a success for taking an idea from HR and developing it into an effective reporting tool for the AP team and the organisation as a whole. The dashboard has enabled the AP team to identify performance issues and be able to react and change to ensure optimum output on an indi-vidual, process or departmental level.

The HR Dashboard and AP Dashboard have been used as models for monitoring performance within other teams at the City of London, and this has enabled the organi-sation to report management information in a more effective way. The end result is that the AP Dashboard has proved to be a comprehensive and innovative AP reporting tool that effectively supports the business and facilitates operational excellence, not only within the AP function, but also in a broader context.

The Winners

City of London Corporation

Ian Martin, Birmingham City Council accepting the team’s award - sponsored by FISCAL Technologies

Innovation in Supporting the Business

In Birmingham City Council, services such as Accounts Payable, provided through a Shared Service Operation, were charged with achieving at least 30% recurring savings by 2018.

They knew that any savings they were able to make, would directly benefit front line services. So rather than simply accept processes as they stand, this AP team went above and beyond in terms of finding innovative ways to create efficiencies.

The team created an interesting scorecarding system to identify improvements and one of the early flags was the 300,000 paper invoices received each year. It wasn’t uncommon for invoices to be over a week old before they arrived for processing. But rather than struggle under the weight of a lack of resources and a manual system, this team were able to make savings of £100,000 by reductions in printing and scanning attachments alone. Their innovative mapping and benchmarking system meant that the AP team’s savings helped to protect front line services.

2nd Place Winners

Birmingham City Council

PPN® LtdBuilding 173Curie AvenueHarwell Science and Innovation CampusDidcotOxon OX11 0QGUnited KingdomTel. 0844 870 0508

p2pnetwork.org@p2pnetwrk