• “Don’t want to use Adobe – PDFs can have viruses”

• “Can I fax it to you? we try not to use emails”

• “I am running out of the office right now…can I just drop it in the mail and you will receive it in a couple of days”

It is a funny world and surprisingly people give all these excuses. One of the contributors to the discussion summarises it very well.

“You would think that the supplier would be delighted to send you an invoice quickly. The sooner they send the invoice, the sooner they get paid, one less statement to mail, less money spent on supplies, one less invoice in collections, etc. I could go on and on how sending an electronic invoice immediately could positively effect their business.”

Let’s see if any more come through… We find these three quite difficult to beat.

The ratio of liquid assets to short-term liabilities continues to be highest it’s been since 1956*.

As CFOs remain uneasy about the economic outlook, this ratio will only stretch further.

So this presents a new problem to financial management: what to do with all that cash?

This is where finance shared services can have a big impact. And this is where shared services can make huge leaps up the value-chain.

Because of the swelling in liquid assets, treasury find itself working increasingly with shared services and procurement. Why?

Well, although the concept of supply chain financing has been around for eons, it’s in an economic cycle, such as this one, where it relevance really kicks in.

Treasury is sitting on cash in an uncertain economic climate. So they are looking for arrangements which are short term (so they’re not locked in), low risk and high yield.  What better than use the cash to pay a supplier earlier, help them stay liquid, and take a discount on the way?

This is a quick, clean way to make this excess cash work for you. But shared services need to be able to support the intentions of treasury, to enable supply chain financing savings to be realised. It’s the cornerstone, the critical link. Shared services need to be able to have their processes running smoothly so invoices can be paid in 5 days or ten days so that discounts can indeed be captured. Without this efficacy, financing arrangements will fall flat.

The treasury-procurement-accounts payable triumvirate is realising exciting gains. One shared services I know of is seeing a £1.3 million annualised net saving because of what they are doing with supply chain financing.

There are some exciting technologies on the market well worth looking at including Taulia. Join me and the Taulia team for our webinar on the 22nd February.

*According to GT News

The reason why I am writing about it is the following:

You remember last week I wrote about 12 considerations on SLAs?

Well, something Luke talked about in his video struck a chord with me.

He mentioned that OB10 in the past had been more focused on SLAs than on service. The ideological separation of these two nouns is key. Just because you are ticking all your SLA boxes, are you intrinsically providing a first class service?

The answer is no. So the trick is to make sure that your SLA doesn’t become an policy document, but more a document that captures what both you and your customer believe to represent ‘service excellence’.

This is  the tricky part as the document therefore needs to capture ‘attitude’. And this is sometimes the evasive bit you can’t quite put your finger on.

We are now collecting templates to share with members. Please send your SLA to me at susie.west@sharedserviceslink.com so I can distribute it on sharedserviceslink.com and if you feel you have an SLA which captures the ‘attitude’ piece, please be one of the first to share.

The communications part of any shared services programme can send a finance person into a tail spin. The traditional reason for this is that finance people don’t know how to communicate. They are more comfortable with numbers than words. I’m not sure if I agree completely. But I do think a finance person, who has been brought up to be more ‘back-office’ focused, now has to learn how to ‘engage’ and sell a vision, and understand requirements of different stakeholders.

These are not skills that come naturally to all finance people. they are much more akin to sales people.

Actually, come to think of it, these are not qualities that come naturally to all sales people.

But communicating is about listening, and once you appreciate that, you realise the best way to communicate with the other party is to simply ask questions.

This is what I like about the Novartis e-invoicing programme that they are doing with Ariba. Here are some of my key take aways:

1. Give your e-invoicing project a name. Something short/quirky/memorable. Novartis’s e-invoicing programme is called eLink. It’s short and snappy. And it’s loaded – it suggests that e-invoicing links parties and it does. Avoid long, dry names that fail to excite.
2. Ensure your project has an identity by getting the elevator pitch right. Define the pitch based on words that resonate with the stakeholders, the company, the suppliers and the project team. Rehearse it and rehearse it till everyone who touches the project is ‘on song’ and aligned.
3. Build the value. Know who your different stakeholder groups are and then tweak your broader messaging accordingly. Each stakeholder needs to hear a slightly different version of your ‘pitch’ (different to your elevator pitch) based on what they care about.
4. Create relevance so people ‘get it’. Novartis built the story of the ‘Rogue Invoice’. It was compelling and yet so simple. It meant people ‘got it’.
5. Tell the story end-to-end. Often people in the process don’t think about how their actions impact downstream activities. They don’t think, because they don’t know the cost of their actions. If you eduate them by showing them the end-to-end process, they normally change their approach to ensure ‘good behaviour’, and buy into solutions that help fix a poorly followed process.

It sounds fiddly but it’s worth it. Once you successfully educate the company on the how, why, and what of your e-invoicing project, they’ll be engaged. And this normally means excited. And excitement is infectious. Once they’re excited they’ll back your programme. The days of being undermined will be gone, and the barriers to e-invoicing success will leak away, leaving you a clearer path to project victory.

To listen to the webinar click here: The amazing difference a stellar comms effort makes to your e-invoicing programme – the Novartis story

What I don’t understand is that households across Europe are blurting out depressing stories during evening news, and we all seem to be listening.

However, ask your suppliers how business is going. And ask your customers too. I met with a technology provider this week in London, and spoke to a shared services leader in Manchester.

Both started off the meetings with talk about the economy. And both talked about their confusion.

Were they missing something, they thought. Business is great, 2012 looks so exciting, and yet the word from the news-desk is telling us something else.

The shared services manager talked about how excited she was about the technology developments in 2012. ‘It’s going to be such a big year for new technologies and new deployments’. Similarly the technology vendor I met with is seeing its pipeline bulge and it’s as if the markets appetite for enabling technologies is mushrooming.

Personally, as an observer to this market, I see that 2012 will be a key year where contracts are signed and technologies that have been considered for a while, are actually deployed.

I vote ‘upbeat’ and look forward to hearing about who has bought what technologies over the coming weeks and months.

I have just had a call with one speaker about SLAs. He has been instrumental in two shared services. And the SLA had a very different role in both. Mainly because of the culture of the organisation.

We were talking about the best shape that his story should take and we found ourselves getting quite philosophical about SLAs.

What do I mean? Well, we typically find ourselves asking ‘big’ questions about big organisational components, like shared services. But as we move down into the mechanics of what a shared services needs in order to move, our ‘big’ questions are asked less and less. And I question the sense of this.

So we decided to go for opening the presentation with ‘what does an SLA mean to you?’. This was followed with, ‘what is the intention of your SLA?’. These questions opened up a flood gate I wasn’t quite prepared for and I found myself firing one question after another at this unsuspecting speaker. Here are some that we both brought up and that will be addressed during his session in March:

1. What’s the intention and role of your SLA?
2. Why bother – what would happen if we didn’t have it?
3. What would the most amazing SLA actually achieve – what would that world look like and do we actually need an SLA to get there?
4. Who is the SLA protecting, if anyone? Why do they need protecting? Is it just papering over another problem (should they need ‘protecting’?)
5. Can we give it another name – the term SLA doesn’t guarantee heightened engagement and sounds a little dry?
6. Is your SLA legal – if so to what degree and if there are penalties how will you enforce them?Who is going to make up the SLA police?
7. Is it in the spirit of customer-supplier or partner-partner? What does your SLA say about your relationship with your customer?
8. What needs to be in it and how long does it need to be? Is it a two-sider or does it compete with the national phone book?
9. Who needs to be involved in the SLA creation and SLA governance?
10. How do you want it to be used? Referred to daily or stuck in a drawer?
11. How ‘work in progress’ should it be? Ie is it really a working document or is the final version ‘signed off’ for another year?
12. What is your company’s perception of your current SLA and does that perception fit?

We put so much importance on our SLAs. We just need to make sure their starting point is spot on. And that starting point starts with some fairly sizeable questions.

Join me for the full session on SLAs and how they can change your world at European Summit for Leaders in Finance Shared Services

So if the concept of Facebook has worked so tremendously, mainly in the consumer environment, how can we bring its qualities into the enterprise world? Specifically, how can we bring it into the finance shared services world?

Well we can, and actually the technology already exists, and the platform is ready for you to use today.

Imagine you have your own profile on this platform, as does everyone else in the company. As a shared services manager or a purchase to pay process lead, you will have certain ‘specialisations’. But you will have other areas you need to skill-up on quickly too.  Hold this thought.

We are all familiar with the ‘group’ concept – anyone that used LinkedIn will be privy to a number of groups. But imagine this group sits within your company. In this group sits the experts (you, should you have the specialisation) and the people who are keen to know (those who need to skill-up fast).

All of a sudden, avenues of information open up. The gold mine that sits within has tunnels forged straight to the prize, built in a a matter of minutes.  Today a shared services manager in Manchester can get access immediately to the brain of a VAT expert in Argentina, when before they had no idea that that brain even existed.

But the beauty of such technology is that it doesn’t end there. Platforms like this sit inbetween CRM tools like salesforce.com, and ERPs like SAP, and suck out relevant information concerning groups and people, updating it real-time. Alerts are sent to group users via text or email if required. And ultimately problems facing the business, and slowing down progress, are resloved quickly and efficiently.

Interested in knowing the name of this platform? sharedserviceslink.com is now on it. As of today. And the platform is called Tibbr and is made available by Nimbus Partners.  It’s quick and easy. For multinationals it will introduce a level of collaboration amongst a community of teachers and students, that didn’t even know they were a community till now.

It’s exciting technology. Shared services and purchase to pay professionals should be all over it.

This week I have sat in on demos and heard about concepts relating to technologies which will impact, in particular, the purchase to pay process.

‘Gamification’ is one concept that will become more widely referred to in 2012. It is based on the idea that users are rewarded for compliant behaviour. The system knows what the right behviour is, ie raising a PO in the ‘right’ way. Therefore when a user follows the approved process, the system knows to give him a ‘like’ sign. He gets a virtual ‘well done’!

It sounds so simple, and to some it might sound patronising. But I can see this working.

Let’s develop this concept: collect 10 ’likes’ and a note goes to your manager to send a €20 voucher for your favourite shop.

As a user, you get the recognition and the good feeling, and you get a voucher too.

As a company, you get more people involved, in a fun way, with following purchase to pay process rules. The process improves and finance shared services really moves into value-add territory as a result.

You get the idea.

SAP are stepping up their focus on gamification. We are researching this for our Purchase to Pay conference taking place in London in June. If you are involved in this in your company, please email me at susie.west@sharedserviceslink.com

So what happens when your first stop is the value-add?

Does it make the shared services concept easier for the business to connect with? Or is the resistence stronger because you haven’t proven yourself as a lord of transactional KPIs?

I was talking to a head of finance business services this week in preparation for his presentation he’s giving at the March Summit. They don’t have a transactional SSC, but they do have an SSC for value adding activities. It’s an interesting approach, because the resistence from the business can be greater should the SSC go straight for the more strategic activities. In this case the SSC owns the provision of management information and has an involvement in pricing decisions.

Historically these are the activities that business units have wished to have kept local and tailor-made to their business requirements. At the very least business units would have wanted an SSC to have cut their teeth on the transactional side first.

Come and find out by joining me in March how this SSC has kept resistence to a minumin and had success introducing KPIs, SLAs and standardisation to value adding activities.

Other companies in Germany seem to be following this trend too: Boehringer Ingelheim has its HQ in Ingelheim. When they decided to set up their shared services centre, they chose to locate it close to the HQ.  A chemicals company that has a shared services presence in Germany and Spain is clawing back some activities from the Spanish operation into the German one. And finally BASF set up its huge shared services centre in Berlin.

I asked my contact if there were tax incentives offered by the German government. The answer was no.

In his opinion the reason was that, as there is a trend for shared services to climb the value chain, so there seems to be more of a business case to keep or establish a shared services operation closer to the business. If much of the transactional piece is automated then there is almost no need to examine off shore countries as a location for your transactional piece.

The VP Global Head Financial Shared Services will be presenting on location choices and influencing factors at the European Summit for Leaders in Finances Shared Services and Outsourcing, London, March 2012.