The Future of Invoice to Cash – In Conversation with the Top GBS Leaders

Sajeesh Kumar

Sajeesh Kumar

Invoice to Cash Global Enterprise Head – Genpact
Sajeesh Kumar is the Global Enterprise Service Line Head for Genpact for almost 11 years, where he is responsible for Designing and Driving Transformation Initiatives across OTC Processes for Global organizations. Prior to that, he was leading the Quote-to-Cash process at HP and has 21+ years of global experience in the Order To Cash Function.
Sonali Nanda

Sonali Nanda

Vice President, Product - HighRadius
Sonali Nanda is the Vice President of Product at Highradius. She has been with HighRadius for the past 8 years and heads product management and product engineering for marquee cross-product & platform functional initiatives at HighRadius like Autonomous, AI/ML, Analytics, etc.
Susie West

Susie West

Founder & CEO - sharedserviceslink
Susie West is the CEO and Founder of the B2B community sharedserviceslink, and is considered an Influencer, Connector, and Expert in finance shared services.

Session Summary:

For invoice to cash, 80% of time is spent gathering data and reducing transactional backlog, leaving just 20% to drive insights, value, and decision-making to accelerate cash flow.
Sajeesh Kumar, invoice to cash lead, Genpact and Sonali Nanda, product lead, HighRadius discuss how it is time to reimagine invoice to cash (I2C)and introduce future-ready instinctive I2C.
They talk about fragmented technology and data, siloed processes and people, and the lack of an end-to-end view across I2C.

Key Takeaways
  • How the pandemic repositioned A/R from just a transactional department within the office of the CFO to a more value-driven function.
  • How the GPOs focus has shifted towards AI-driven end-to-end automation in the A/R function.
  • How automation has enabled A/R teams to redefine their approach into a strategic, decision-making, and customer relationship-building role.
  • What are the major leading and lagging indicators that define the success of an Order-To-Cash transformation.
  • What is Straight Through Automated Receivables (STAR), and how does the PIE2 index help in measuring A/R performance.

Julie Dinh(Facilitator)  0:00  

Please answer in the q&a section on your screen. The recording of today’s session will be available by the end of the day. If you want a PDF of the presentation right away, please visit the shared services tech LinkedIn page linked in the Details section. Also would appreciate it if you took some time to leave a review after the session today and share your feedback on the session. To do so, please click rate the session or the hearts on the video player. But that being said, we now welcome everyone to this panel discussion on the future of invoice to cash. And in this session, we have with us Sajeesh Kumar, Global enterprise service line head at Genpact. Sonali Nanda, She’s the VP of product at HighRadius, and the session will be moderated by Susie West. She is the founder and CEO of sharedserviceslink. Short introduction of everyone. This is Sajeesh Kumar; he is the global enterprise service line head for Genpact for almost 11 years, where he is responsible for designing and driving transformation initiatives across LTC processes for global organizations. Prior to that, he was leading the order to cash process at HP and has 21 plus years of global experience in the Order to cash function. Sonali Nanda is the Vice President of Product at HighRadius. She has been with HighRadius for the past eight years and has product management and product engineering for marking cross-product and performing functional initiatives at HighRadius like autonomous AI, and now analytics, etc. And last the panelist, Susie, she is the CEO and founder of a beautiful community sharedserviceslink and is considered an influencer, connector, and expert in financial services. With that being said, Susie, I’ll go ahead and hand it over to you.

Susie West(Speaker III)  1:42  

That’s great. Julie, thank you so much and HighRadius, thank you so much for facilitating this great conversation today. So let’s kick off Sajeesh, Sonali, lovely to have you as my panelists. So let’s kick off with talking a bit about the future of invoice to cash. Hopefully, we are out of the worst of COVID-19, and 2020. Itself was obviously presented a lot of uncertainty to all kinds of businesses, enterprise companies in particular, and right across the board, but we’re kind of talking a bit more about enterprise organizations. I think we’re all experiencing, or we would have experienced how invoice to cash would have changed as a priority in the office of the CFO. Just a huge need and hunger to get that cash in as quickly as possible. And for GPOs, global processing is within order to cash. This meant an immediacy around needing to reconfigure processes, getting top of processes, standardizing and automating processes, and making sure that they were adapted so that they could kind of solve immediate issues but also future-proof. Should we come across something like this again? So questions to both Sajeesh and Sonali are with everything that happened in the last kind of 12-14 months and the impact that it had on order to cash. How do you think it’s impacted the long-term vision for global process owners, and what do you see to be the future in order to cash?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  3:19  

So thanks, Susie, Sonali, a pleasure to be here talking to you about invoice to cash. As always, and hoping all of our colleagues, family friends across Southeast Asia, ravaging to the pandemic, as we talk through, are going to be having better days ahead. But your questions are two questions to that, Susie. The first one is, how has the uncertainty and the future-proofing of the role of invoice to cash work? So let me address that first. I strongly believe that AR as a function has not just gained prominence within the CFO office alone but across the district and the enterprise. Today, our data is looked at across the enterprise, not just with the CFO. So that is something that has taken a turn for the good. I strongly believe that even though the AR function still falls under the responsibility sphere of the CFO office, the impact of this function goes way beyond the enterprise logic branches, across multiple functions, stakeholders internally, and even externally. So the biggest lesson from the past 18 months has been exactly that. So what has derived after this is that functional silos are being broken, and digital transformation is truly accelerated weeks now versus years, and truly end-to-end conversations are happening with common business objectives in mind. Data is key. Everybody wants to know how data is, you know, coming through what the data is actually telling us. And to a larger extent, how dynamic and flexible enterprises out in that space have proven to be the make or break of eating food. Now there’s the second part of it which is, what is the future of invoice to cash? In my mind,  I would put the future of invoice to cash into two phases. One is being instinctive, and two is driving value outcomes. The days of worrying about efficiency gains alone and a few million as cash flow. Well, within the mandates of the AR portfolio managed by the GPS leaders are long gone. Marketing has accelerated that acceptance, the receivables management function can be so much more than just efficient transactional processes, generating actionable Business Insights across the enterprise spectrum, leading to positive value outcomes such as cash, revenue, margin, experience, that is what the future of AR is heading towards. So AR analysts of the future will become more relationship and analysis oriented and we’ll be more than insight generators for those functions of an enterprise, really is my view.

Julie Dinh(Facilitator)  5:54  

Right, thank you. How about you, Sonali?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  5:58  

Yeah, so thanks Susie, by the way, great question. I totally concur on a lot of points with what Sajeesh brought up. Now talking from my experience, what I’m seeing uncertainty which has happened because of the pandemic and other socio-economic factors I feel, has just accelerated the increasing focus on cash flows, right. It was always there, but it has just become accelerated. Now people want real-time visibility into a global centralized; you can call it as 360 degrees AR health status, right. People are looking for solutions for cutting down on the growing headcount costs or optimizing those costs and making AR a much more strategic function. And the customer-oriented function was pretty much what Sajeesh was saying. You know, they wanted it to be a customer relationship function. The focus is also shifted towards the software that can provide more end-to-end AR automation, right, versus being just a centralized way of handling stuff. The focus has gone high on automation and the other perspective which we see is how can this AR software make accurate decisions through recommendations and predictions Right. One of the additional criteria which I see in certain areas is enabling remote work, Right. So that is to the first part of your question, which you were saying, what is the impact you are seeing? Now coming to what would be the future of invoice to cash, I strongly believe that the future of invoice to cash seems to be more like an autonomous environment. Autonomous fully integrated invoice to cash software that provides not only end to end automation but also makes smarter decisions and recommendations for the AR analyst. Right. Giving an example here, predicting which customers to prioritize as an example, based on predicted delinquencies or identifying hard-to-find invalid deductions, right. For faster recovery are some examples, right. Similarly, thinking about autonomous systems providing a 360-degree view of the customer data, or providing tips to the collectors on what to talk on the cause capturing notes and taking collection actions on behalf of the collector, thus, enabling the analyst to focus on more strategic functions could be how the future will look like right. Again, I concur with Sajeesh, the point of data. Future is going to capitalize on data and provide deep visibility into the metrics and insights. But benchmarking for a manager or head of the organization focuses on which are the right areas, right. Whether it is analyst performance, which is an issue, or is it process inefficiencies, which are an issue? Or is it customer performance, which is an issue? So that’s the kind of visibility which people could look forward to when it comes to measurement? One last thing which I wanted to add, technology-wise, I see self-learning AI as something which is going to replace normal RPA bots for sure. Yeah, what would you say, Susie?

Susie West(Speaker III)  9:14  

Well, so Sonali, that’s all great. And you touched on metrics a little bit just there. So let’s just build on that with our next question. Is it kind of in your experience, and again, like looking forward, so say now and maybe metrics for the future? Can you help us understand a bit about the kind of metrics that auditor cash leaders should be looking at in order to measure the success of their invoice to cash process?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  9:42  

Sure, sure. So um, metrics is one of my favorite topics. So let me give a little bit of details here, right. So I strongly feel that you know the order to cash leaders should look at invoice to cash process with two different dimensions when it comes to measurement. One is efficiency, and the other is effectiveness Right. Let me explain that a little bit. Efficiency is the cost of receivables processing, right. So think about what is the percentage of receivables collected without any human touch, right. That’s like full automation. You didn’t even need a collector to touch it or with some minimal intervention or something like what is the percentage of auto-applied cash, right. So those are indicators of efficiency gains. And this is primarily driven by automation. And while these kinds of metrics are lagging indicators, there can be a lot of leading indicators like okay, in the cash app world, what is my remittance capture rate or in the software will obviously tell you some leading indicators towards the final location. So when it comes to effectiveness, it is about the impact which is created because of the AR function, right. So, for example, what is the percentage of non-bad debts, right. That is, and this is an outcome of non-aging invoices and recovery from invalid deductions or history also chargebacks. Right. Now, a lot of times, companies or opposition leaders focus more on efficiency and cost optimization, or on effectiveness, but not necessarily both Right. So what I see, I strongly believe here is the two metrics coming together, efficiency and effectiveness, could be key for measuring the success of the future transformation projects. And let me give you a small example here. So let’s say your collections might be a lot more automated, thus leading to your collectors. But is that actually resulting in, you know, controlling your receiver aging as an example. And this is exactly where technology has a big role to play in the traditional EPM PPO paradigm, which we were living in. And that’s where I’m in Susie; it’s interesting to hear all out that we are excited to partner with the likes of Genpact as an example. Right? To bring in that fusion of technology and processes, but more metrics-driven, or outcome-driven, right. So that’s how I would like to call it out. So think about it in two words, the fusion of efficiency and effectiveness. And measuring it with proper benchmarks, which are coming from the industry, is the best way to measure the success of any transformation project.

Susie West(Speaker III)  12:32  

Great, some really great tips there for metrics and KPIs. So you’re excited, Sonali. And I’m sure the rest of HighRadius says about the strategic relationship with impact. And I understand that they’re very excited about it as well. So question to you, Sajeesh. So maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the partnership with HighRadius, the why behind it? Why are you partnering with them, obviously, specifically on the invoice to cash process, and why do you see it as a strategic move? And also, if you could just talk a little bit about what this combination of partnership means for the future of global business services and shared services.

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  13:13  

Happy to Susie, But before I jump into the context and talk about the partnership itself, let me tell you that at Genpact before we went down the partnership route, we strongly believe that the future of finance will be extensively influenced by an ideal combination of digital and domain. And you will be surprised to know the whole Genpact and HighRadius partnership by itself was facilitated by our common clients who actually understood the thing. So the coming together of leaders in AR software as a service in the AR domain space was, in my mind, inevitable and destined, right. Always a very exceptional pleasure to be talking about that and having seen that successful within itself. But over and above the platform offerings across the AR function and the process IT that Genpact has brought to the table, Sonali was talking about that. The common interest for both enterprises was primarily the maniacal rhyme centricity and the intent to drive value outcomes for our clients as primary objectives. In my honest opinion, HighRadius was one of the SAS companies that were eager to talk about your licensing revenue and also talk about business outcomes that were huge. Now Genpact has the scale of experience to deliver end-to-end transformation for AR, and HighRadius is a strategic choice of the technology provider in order to cash. It’s a win-win-win across us, our customers, and HighRadius. And what about all of this, Susie? What is exciting is the coming together of minds from both organizations to develop new IP. We are really defining how AR should be tracked and measured in the future. We’ve been questioning the traditional norms of AR, designing the ideal mix of digital and domain across industries and markets, and pushing the boundaries that make sense in a new normal environment. One of the outcomes of that is the staff framework and the PIE square index approach, which is quite a unique and innovative way of redefining the value from an AR function that ideally balances efficiency and effectiveness. In fact, we are so confident of this framework, and this instance, the whole commercial framework of the STAR is less traditional SAS license fee model and more on committed business outcomes.

Susie West(Speaker III)  15:23  

Great. Sounds fascinating. And I think everyone that’s attending today would like to know a little bit more about the STAR. Could you elaborate on that?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  15:31  

Happy to Susie, So for years, and even now in pockets, the biggest challenge that most enterprises have had is to spend millions of dollars on tech interventions with no assurance of whether the tech would work at all. And with zero business context associated with that purchasing decision. So businesses then have to live with it and make do with what was handed to them. You then have to invest in an army of either data scientists or domain experts, which is all very contradictory. To the whole initial intent of making things easy and smarter, you’ll basically end up with a major science experiment. But that’s not the core business. It’s a distraction. So our objective was to solve that specific challenge. We said, intended to deliver an ideal AR function for our clients that balances efficiency and effectiveness in equal measure, without diluting the value of each. Of course, having business insights and values comes as a primary compass to the lifestyle we wanted to achieve. STAR stands for straight-through air. And that is a result of our common research that helps enterprises wade through this maze of digital transformation with AR. And it happens with zero to minimal effort on their end, zero disruption for business as usual, and then they also enjoy the fruits of committed business outcomes. How we went about this was through the marriage of Genpact IP and the HighRadius AI offerings clubbed in one software instance. Now Genpact has deep expertise in how industries operate, how consumer goods companies operate, licenses operate, heavy manufacturing companies operate. We know how their customer segments behave and why they behave in that manner. We know what works and what does not work. We know how connected AB/AR ecosystems work. I mean, the retail companies we work with, the manufacturing company, how the distributors work versus the wholesalers. All of this comes into play. And you have best practices of over two and a half decades of running AR businesses for leading companies. You have frameworks in place. You have policies, analytics, use cases, Business Insights, and HighRadius perfected the use cases in AI on specific business functions across AR. So when we jointly brought this together, an assurance of delivery of a straight-through AR function is backed up by extensive domain and digital depth, and it is very real. The STAR instance, for now, is live on HighRadius. It’s an amalgamation of  Genpact processing frameworks, which is embedded into the HighRadius digital SAS platform. So see, this was our vision of the ideal inverse, the cash function of the future that is scalable, instinctive, and more value generated. Now the journey did not end there. You will see that I spoke about STAR you’d ask what is PIE? What we also realized as we went through that thought process was that there is no one metric that definitively tracks the ideal balance of efficiency and effectiveness of an AR function. You needed a plethora of AR metrics to assess if you’re successful in the journey at all. So we innovated that too, and we developed an index called the perfect inverse index. And then, we added on the PIEsquare. The E stands for square, which is efficiency and effectiveness. In my mind, I constantly call it the one AR metric to replace all averages. Now, this is an index that picks the ideal weightage relevant to an industry or market with the specific nuances considered from them across three key efficiency metrics, and three effectiveness metrics that in itself cover all of the AR functions. Think of it this way: we wanted our genius leaders and AR leaders to go to their CFO tomorrow. The project is one metric on a page to show the CFO exactly how we are performing. In summary, if the AR function was the rifle that you were driving, and specific value outcomes where your destination STAR will be your engine and PIE your Google Map.

Susie West(Speaker III)  19:28  

Great. Thank you. Okay, that kind of transitions us on to kind of closing thoughts. So kind of looking at the last 18 months or so, and looking forward. What would be your recommendation to leaders in order to cash and GBS leaders generally about what their kind of North STAR might look like? In the coming months and years.

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  19:58  

I would suggest a four-point Approach just to align on the company and business objectives of what is key? Is customer experience cash cost compliance? Or is it all of the above is all about what are the trade-offs possible, what takes precedence? I think it’s important to have that honest, objective conversation because you cannot chase after multiple directions at this very agile requirement. The second thing that I’ll say is to link the business objective to the process policy platform and people strategy. This is what I call the PPP kit. What we say is that you know, every single process decision, every single policy decision, platform decision, and people’s strategy should be assigned to what matters to the business objectives, experience cuts across all of them. So that’s the second part. The third angle I put across is, then you can design the ideal mix of domain and digital that makes sense for your industry, region, and business units. This cannot be replicated from one enterprise to another beyond upon, and that effort needs to be made. You just cannot plug in something and think that it will solve world hunger. Design is key. The fourth one that I’ll put across is track value outcomes as a key metric. What gets tracked gets improved. If you’re tracking accuracy and it still, well, you might be doing great in that, but you’re not going to deliver value beyond that component. So it’s necessary to do that. But about all of these remain agile, I think it’s important to think beyond the mandates of theAR portfolio that are managed for the AR specific metrics alone, sharing data, insights, information extensively with upstream functions; those things matter.

Susie West(Speaker III)  21:42  

Great. How about you, Sonali?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  21:46  

Yeah, so from my side, I would say the number one thing which you should do is focus on the business results or the outcomes in the long term. But at the same time, I think you should have a solid pulse for leading indicators in the short term, right. And why that is important, because a lot of times some of these indicators we talked about take time to STARt getting reflected in your outcomes. So my strong recommendation would be not to wait for two years or three years to find out if your project or digital transformation journey is successful, or not, break it down into a science, come up with those leading indicators and STARt tracking and getting a 360-degree view upfront, right. And we have done that with some of our clients. And we have seen a lot of proven results. And this is where I completely agree with Sajeesh. I was very keenly listening to Sajeesh because of the STAR offering, which he talked about, and that’s what definitely brings in a lot of credibility. Now coming to the long term, short term indicators, a couple of things you can use from a software perspective is to watch out for short term performance from HighRadius as well. Definitely, something which you should look out for as it is aimed at making your teams so documented, right. When it comes to automation, in general, you should. I would highly recommend looking beyond the normal RPA software. So making the right software choice is very important. And take the full advantage of the autonomous and AI used cases, that is going to put your analysts in autopilot mode because those are the used cases which are finally going to drive efficiency and effectiveness, right and in turn even affect the PIE square, which Sajeesh was talking about. So that’s what would be my  suggestion or recommendation.

Susie West(Speaker III)  23:37  

Thank you, Sonali. Great. Just before we move to the q & a from the floor, please, we’ve got lots of participants in this session. Please go ahead and put your questions to Sajeesh, Sonali just by writing them into the box available. And just before we do that, we’re going to run a poll question. So we just have this ticking over in the background. Would you like to know more about AI-powered automation solutions from HighRadius? Yes, please connect me to an expert. Yes, send me some material for my research, or maybe no, not right now. So while we’re doing that, let’s go ahead. But the first question to our panelists. I’ll STARt with Sonali. Maybe Sajeesh, you’d like to come in on this one. So, Sonali, you were really talking about some metrics there and some great metrics really useful for the listeners to be taking away. Could you elaborate or make a suggestion around the kind of customer experience metrics? And also, talk about how technology can enable a better customer experience? How these platforms or platforms like HighRadius can actually practically deliver a better customer experience? Maybe you can give some examples?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  24:55  

Sure, sure. I think it’s a good question, and I did touch base that probably but didn’t go very deep into it. So think about it anywhere where the software is delivering effectiveness, okay? It has a direct correlation to customer experience. So let’s put it that way, right. So anywhere where the software or the process is delivering effectiveness, so in the sense, you are not following up with the customer, if they’re going to be right, or you know that the customer will pay you when hence you are not going in pestering the customer. That’s the STARting point of a customer experience, right. Now, how does software enable that? Now, let me use a very simple example of an AI used case, So let’s say a collection of AI used cases predicting for you when an invoice will get paid, right. And that information in itself is trying to help you prioritize your customer work list and guide you when to touch base with the customer or not. Now, if the payment is going to come on a certain date, and the system is predicting that for you, you really don’t need to follow up with the customer. Right. Another example I can give here is, let’s say you’re calling up the customer and you want to know about some of the small talks that you had with the customer before like, you know, knowing about when was their birthday? Or knowing about even simple things like where are they located? In which portion of the world they are located? When should you call them? What is the best time for you to call them? If those kinds of recommendations STARt coming from software, you STARt, you know, building that taking and customer experience to the next level. So that’s the kind of, you know, you can see an impact which AI and autonomous can create. And of course, any metric which is when it comes to metrics, any metric, which is creating high effectiveness will definitely have a high correlation with customer experience. Sajeesh, do you want to add anything?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  26:49  

Yeah, so just being off on what you shared is early for me; customer experience is a business outcome. And I was talking extensively about this because I wouldn’t be reading that separately at all. It is a business outcome. We live in a world of people-to-people engagements. And if you know both user experience, as well as customer experience, is not positively influenced. Everything else does have a leakage point. You know, you gave a few examples of how it matters when a collector is having a conversation that is more empathy-driven and emotional and more, you know, connected. Rather than just talking numbers. It helps, and that might be a good thing as well, but over and beyond that, it is also about simple factors that you actually enable through the design of your software and your process. That tomorrow, for example, you do not call up a customer who’s actually made a payment, but it is just not applied in your cash, and therefore you have to actually call them if you don’t want that kind of a situation that is a huge dent on customer experience by any means. And those are things that can be fundamentally solved through a proper design and proper connection in terms of how your process works. So absolutely customer experience is a key component and technology can drive technology, and domain both should drive it should not be a one thing or the others maybe.

Susie West(Speaker III)  28:12  

Great. The service question is kind of building on it, but it’s really zeroing in on AI to kind of a deeper extent. So customer experience is something GBS leaders are focusing on, and I think you’re right in just wrapping it up in the business outcomes there, Sajeesh, as far as kind of phrase physiology is concerned. And given customers are more informed and are expecting a faster resolution these days, they’re expecting the GBS generally to be more dynamic and nimble. How do you think AI and freedom is another wider HighRadius technology and other AI technology out there as well? How do you think it is helping within this area?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  29:00  

Sure. So Susie, when it comes to AI, let me give a couple more examples. I think that’s the best way to look at it and go deeper. Also, think if the customer is looking for a faster resolution, which means what if they have disputed an invoice they want to know? Okay, what’s the stand of you know, my supplier on the side? What’s the stand? Are you approving or not approving. As an example, a lot of times, people take time to work on a certain dispute on a deduction because there is a huge backlog piled up. Now think about the AI system, which is able to predict and identify the potential invalidates and also automatically clear the potential balance. So in the deduction world, then if you think from a customer perspective, they are going to get a faster response with respect to which of those disputes are approved or which are denied as an example right. So that is a very good example of how the style you know correlates to faster resolution. I mean, The other aspects of making customers happy are something which I touched base and while responding to the previous question where, you know, think about a world where whether it’s a feeder or autonomous or AI is providing insights about using the 360-degree data on what should you talk to the customer, giving the information handy to the collector, so that they are not asking the same questions again, and again. Similarly, if I think about it a little bit in the credit world, let’s say, right, the customers often get into blocked order state, right. But think about a world where the AI system is able to predict that a certain customer is going to get into a blocked order state and enables the credit analyst or the collector to follow up with the customer and ensure that they get the payment before time so that the customer is not waiting in the queue to get their orders released as an example. I get that’s an example of, you know, faster resolution, faster communication, and making sure that the customer and, you know, their analysts have a great relationship.

Susie West(Speaker III)  31:13  

Okay. Most of the customer issues that this particular viewer is experiencing, and no doubt relates to many others on the line, are around billing. So what would be the HighRadius, platform, solution, or module to specifically address billing and master data issues?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  31:42  

Okay. All right. So, when it comes to mastering data issues, I think, let me take it in two parts. One is the data which is stored in the ERP. Right, we cannot do a lot about it. Because ultimately, you have to mention, you know, store your customer master data, you have to store your material master in the ERP that is used across all modules. But having said that, in the previous module in the product, across all the products, you have the flexibility to fix the month master data issues, right. If your ERP is not the source of truth, and let’s say you have an Excel sheet, or there is some other software, which is a source of truth, those can be brought in. And the administrative access is given to the admin administrators of the specific AR group to maintain those master data records in the system. So this is not specifically software. This is functionality available and all the products of HighRadius. So, for example, if a collection looks at customer Master, then you can maintain customer master. If a cash app is looking at, let’s say, some amount of customer relationship like the oil payer, you can go ahead and maintain that too. right. If a deduction is looking at material, that is when you subscribe to deductions as an example. So that is the master data. Susie, what was the other question?

Susie West(Speaker III)  33:09  

So say master data. You talked about billing extensively?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  33:12  

Billing. Yeah, so billing is very, very, it’s again, it’s not a separate module, I believe. When you’re talking about billing, you’re talking about the overall building of the software. Again, it’s an Into it, but if you’re talking about an invoice, billing, and delivering invoices to the customers, then electronic invoice presentment and payment is the product from HighRadius, which solves that problem.

Susie West(Speaker III)  33:37  

Okay, good. So moving on to the next question again. Viewers, if you have more questions, please send them through. We’ve got a couple more minutes. Before we close this session, do we foresee asynchronous I cannot say that word communication platforms are powered by AI. Are they planning on? Or do you see them integrating with core software to deliver customer experience? And is this recommended for all? Or is this recommended at all?

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  34:10  

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think this is an interesting insight, which we have been also thinking about for a while in our product labs that doesn’t even make sense for the customers and analysts to, you know, asynchronously communicate. Honestly, I would say the focus, at least right now, should be to fix the processes as well as the metrics and, you know and drive customer relationships through that. But I would not be surprised to see if asynchronous communication ever comes to the software world. So yeah, maybe it’s a very, very futuristic roadmap item. But I would not expect that, you know, you’ll have to do it immediately.

Susie West(Speaker III)  34:54  

How about you Sajeesh, Anything to add to that?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  34:57  

I have a subject matter expert lens rather than a tech lens to that question, and my question would be, can you do something like that on a SaaS platform? I’m sure, you know, minds, like Sonali, and all can make that happen. Right with her team. My question is, how does it help me in my value offers? Or does it actually move the needle in terms of delivering value to the customer? If it is a yes, then it’s a no-brainer. If it is a no, then why are we doing this? Just because we have a function. You don’t need to tick that light on. It’s like switching on a light during the daytime. But you can, If but you need to use the question you need to ask on the previous question, though. We were talking about master data and billing, and that’s reality. The absolutely fair question was. But today, the AR leaders or the GBS leaders, when they share information, saying I have a master data problem causing trouble with my pasties. It’s a very generic statement that they need. What is tomorrow? You can back that up with data with insights of saying these many invoices caused due to master data issues at our end caused due to billing errors. And this is what is actually costing you. The CFOs office, do you want to do something about it, gives a much more deeper conversation and insights to resolve that problem. So AR like I mentioned, it’s not just about solving all the problems that aren’t alone, but also sharing information that can help other stakeholders or function solve their problems.

Susie West(Speaker III)  36:35  

Moving on, thank you. Sajeesh. So for the success of digital transformation projects, obviously, measuring the ROI is important. We also talked about the other factors that are important there, the business impact, and business outcomes. And could you just summarize maybe both of you how HighRadius and Genpact to making this happen?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  37:06  

You want to go first, Sonali. I’m trying to understand the question. Sorry, Susie, if you could repeat if possible.

Susie West(Speaker III)  37:11  

Yes. Happily. Okay. So I think it boils down to just summarizing the relationship between HighRadius and Genpact. How is the partnership between the two organizations really helping the success of digital transformation projects within across companies?

Sajeesh Kumar(Speaker I)  37:37  

Perfect. So, Susie, there used to be times when a software provider would go in and take a product off the shelf and provide them across and say, okay, you are subject matter experts figure it out and deploy right. There will be times when we as subject matter experts will go in and say, here are all my plethora of best practices and insights and all of that, and the software provider would look at it and say, I’m not changing all of these from an off the shelf product right It just doesn’t make sense. Why are you asking me to change all of this? That’s not what I wanted to say. That is what exactly was going across when for businesses, and it is not helping businesses at all, by any means, where you have to handle the software that you purchased. And then you have to handle the domain and the business expertise that is coming in. And both were not talking to each other. These days, when we see Genpact, and HighRadius go hand in hand, we’re talking the same language. The Genpact is throwing processing across for this industry for this particular customer segment here. I believe this particular collection strategy is what needs to be defined and decided. And then our HighRadius colleagues actually say, perfect, tell me where we should do it, how dynamic it should be. And let’s develop that and put across that 14 week period of where the design phase happens. And 14 is the extended period. It can happen anywhere between 10 to 14 weeks by you actually developing that together sets a very strong foundation, both from a business standpoint, as well as a software standpoint, to deliver the value that the business is looking for. And they don’t have the headache of trying to explain one thing or the other. I’m trying to be the bridge between those two components. And that is the biggest value that I’ve seen. And then, once you have that designed right when the value STARts flowing in. It is a pleasure to watch.

Susie West(Speaker III)  39:28  

Thank you, Sonali.

Sonali Nanda(Speaker II)  39:34  

Yeah, sorry, I was muted. Okay. Yeah. So I think Sajeesh did summarize it to that to you know, to the perfect extent, but I’ll just put it this way that if you think about Genpact and HighRadius, you need to think about just two things. One is straight through account receivables, and that is happening through you knowing your process optimization and automation. All right. As long as you’re thinking in these lines, I think that’s the value prop from which the STAR solution brings to the table or partnership attention fact, and this brings to the table the perfect invoice effectiveness and efficiency score. Obviously, that’s going to go up because you’re touching both the efficiency metrics as well as the effectiveness metrics, which is the fusion of the best of both worlds, right. So that’s the impact which the partnership of Genpact and Heidi is going to bring to the table.

Susie West(Speaker III)  40:37  

Great, Sonali Nanda and Sajeesh Kumar. Thank you so much. I’m Susie west. It’s been a pleasure. And now I’d like to hand it back to Julie. Thank you, everyone, again for joining today.

Thank you.

Julie Dinh(Facilitator)  40:54  

So, Thank you once again for joining us today. Thank you. Sonali, Thank you, Sajeesh. Thank you, Susie. Thank you, everyone, for joining today’s session. That’s all the time we have for today. If we were unable to answer your questions, we promise we will follow up with you following the session. And if you have any additional questions for our panel today regarding today’s topic, please feel free to reach out to me, and we’ll get you connected. Also, don’t forget to check out the Shared Services tech event LinkedIn page to obtain a copy of today’s presentation and join discussions with fellow attendees. The link is available in the details section on your screen. The next session we have for today is a case study with Bayer titled, ‘How a digital shift greatest savings, improved customer experience and agility benefits for Bayer’ that begins at 9 am Central time before we leave. We’d really appreciate it again if you’ll take a few seconds to rate the session. Thank you all again, and we’ll see you at the next one.

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