The Annual Procure-to-Pay Leaders' Meeting

May 23rd – 25th 2012, Chicago

 

You are a leader in procure to pay, right?

Then ask yourself the following questions and see how you score:

1. How ‘on top’ of your KPIs are you?
2. How supported are you by the rest of the organization?
3. How value-adding is your procure-to-pay process?
4. How automated is your invoice process?
5. How much money are you adding to the bottom line through dynamic discount capture?
6. How are you deploying strategies like ‘gamification’ to your processes so your first time match rate is over 95%?

If you answered ‘very’ or ‘a lot’ to all the above, then well done you!

But most procure to pay leaders don’t.

Why? There is a simple answer to this which I will reveal later.

In the meantime, when was the last time you ‘checked in’ with other procure-to-pay leaders and learned from them, benchmarked with them and tapped into their experience and wisdom? Wouldn’t you agree that time spent doing this is massively effective?

This is why I am inviting your to our Annual Procure-to-Pay Leaders Meeting in Chicago.

My name is Susie West. I founded sharedserviceslink.com in 2007 because I had been in this market for 8 years and discovered what this market was missing:
A place where like-minded procure to pay leaders could come and ‘mind share’, A place where they could learn and exchange, and leave feeling confident and inspired and ready to drive through the change they needed to. A place where they would leave, reinvigorated and with a changed perspective on working life.

The Annual Procure to Pay Leaders Meeting is this place.

Take a look at the programme if you need to. But as a priority, book your place at this event. It’s a three- day event and for every hour you spend at the meeting you will save weeks in your procure-to-pay projects.

Need more proof?:

“I must say that this was one of the best conferences that I have ever attended. It had more of a user group feeling versus a conference with a high degree of vendor marketing.  Also Susie West and her team were so supportive and friendly.”
John Terraciano, Director of Finance, DSM
 
“sharedserviceslink.com is different from other conferences as the networking and real end-user experience exchange is heavily encouraged and well-facilitated”
Miguel Sosa, Shared Services Director, Grupo Kuo
 
“This has been one of the best conferences, if not the best, I have ever attended. It exceeded my expectations”
Cathy Wright, Director of Treasury Operations, Graphic Packaging

So why don’t procure to pay leaders answer ‘very’ or ‘a lot’ to the first 6 questions?

Because they haven’t been successful in one area, which we will be focusing on at the meeting: how to successfully sell you procure-to-pay vision so all your stakeholders ‘get it’.

Join me as I chair the meeting, and join our excellent speaker line-up.

 

sharedserviceslink.com is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors.  State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit.  Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.learningmarket.org.

 

 

DAY 1: Thursday May 24th 2012

08:00 Registration and coffee

08:45 The P2P Matrix – join me on the grand tour!
All companies want to free up their existing P2P staff to focus on more value-adding, non-transactional activities or simply reduce headcount. New and upgraded procure-to-pay automation tools have recently provided companies with a much-needed route to achieving these goals and becoming best-in-class. In this session, Susie West guides you through the sharedserviceslink.com P2P Matrix to show you where your technology gaps are and discusses new technologies on the market.

Susie West
CEO
sharedserviceslink.com

09.45 The power that comes from linking departments
How do you practically link traditional functional silos such as supply chain and payables together? And what results can you expect from this? In this session, Cynthia Haug shares her experience and results from achieving this at GE Healthcare, Johnson Controls and now at Newmont Mining Corporation. Attend this session to discover how to:

• Conduct P2P process analysis to identify where there are breaking/risk points in your P2P process and what is causing high costs
• Gain buy-in from your key internal P2P stakeholders so they take appropriate action for change
• Move from functional silos to being in control of a global end-to-end P2P process – what results can you expect?

Cynthia Haug
SCM-Global Procure to Pay Manager
Newmont Mining Corporation

10.30 Morning coffee

Streamed Sessions
STREAM A: Standardizing and stabilizing your processes 11.00 From chaos to control. Moving from a disparate, multi-ERP environment to a standard and stable ERP for P2P Moving to a standard, global ERP and accounts payable process is not easy. One year after rolling out SAP in the US, Paul Williams from Kraft Foods has compelling learnings from this journey and will share them with you in this presentation, including: How to set up and measure baseline metrics when commencing your standardization project How to overcome technical challenges smoothly and efficiently How much should you really prepare for change management? And what happens if you don’t	OR	STREAM B: P-cards 11.00 Are P-cards the answer to making payments easy? What about losing control? And what about fraud? Sometimes your P-card program seems robust but is realizing low-level savings, and you may think it’s exposing you to fraud. How do you rationalize control? In this session, discover how to make your P-card program the most effective it can be, by hearing how one company dramatically increased spend over their P-cards, removed noise (i.e. low dollar, frequent purchases) and freed up its staff to concentrate on more strategic procurement initiatives. Learn how to: Set the controls you really need to manage your program globally Use mandatory and non-mandatory messages to maximize supplier adoption Communicate and train your business on how to correctly comply with your P-card program Paul Williams Director of Global Source-to-Pay Business Process Management and Catalyst for Source to Pay Kraft Foods

 

11.45 What does “success” mean to you? A tour of KPIs your peers are using and what they are doing with this information.
Monitoring your performance uncovers what areas of your process are in most need of attention. But what are the key metrics that you should be using to tell a full and accurate story? In this interactive session, you will discuss with your peers what metrics are important to you, and how you define them and how you use this information to drive improvements. Leave this session knowing exactly where you stand.

Facilitated by:
Gary Collins
Senior Director Shared Services
Simplot

Kathleen Hamm
Accounts Payable Manager
Simplot

12.30 The speaker clinic

13.00 Networking lunch

14.00 Touching your invoices? You don’t need to. 14 'how to’s' to touchless processing
Why are we still touching invoices? Other companies aren’t so why are we? James Copeland from BMC software will talk about the 14 'how to’s' that have taken BMC from multiple touchpoints to touchless.

Facilitated by:
James Copeland
VP Financial Shared Services
BMC Software

Streamed Sessions
STREAM A: Increasing supplier satisfaction 14.45 How we got $250 million spend through e-procurement in the first 12 months. Channel your spend through preferred suppliers the smart way. If you channel your spend through e-procurement tools, your organization can achieve significant savings. But how do you implement e-procurement so the project gets traction quickly? The Scotts Company is seeing $250 million of spend going through their Hubwoo e-procurement tool in just one year. So how are they achieving this? In this session, examine how to: Prepare for an e-procurement rollout – what change management techniques do you need to use? Ensure your user training is consistently effective Maximize your level of spend being channelled through e-procurement tools Manage the project so the ROI is compelling Douglas Hendricks Indirect Sourcing Manager The Scotts Company   15:30 Afternoon refreshments STREAM A: Increasing supplier satisfaction 16.00  Accounts payable as a true business partner? Really? Can accounts payable ever be trusted to take on more activities and really deliver on the business’ needs when the business has historically seen AP as a data-cruncher? In this session, ABB shares how its AP can now handle any number of acquisitions and has become a respected business partner. Hear how to: Handle a decentralized supply chain through setting up the right governance structures Use change management and process improvement methodologies to make technologies deliver on their word Drive significant improvements in key metrics including first time match rates, payments on time and PO compliancy Be seen and treated as a valuable partner to the business Gayle Tsipis Accounts Payable Manager ABB	OR	STREAM B: Delivering continuous process improvements 14.45 Process improvement without technology investments? In today’s economic environment, all companies strive to control expenses and manage resources efficiently. Most feel this goal is achieved through deploying technology. That is not always the case. In this session, learn how Amylin Pharmaceutical’s top continuous improvement project surpassed tough targets in procurement and accounts payable, without introducing technology. Discover how to: Use Kaizen methodologies with a cross-functional team Find solutions without adding software or capital expenditures Save money and redirect staff to perform value-added tasks Kathy Tanner Manager Accounts Payable Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Chris Allbritain Associate Director Strategic Sourcing/Procurement Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc.     STREAM B: Risk management 16.00  Don’t like risk? Stop gambling in your accounts payable and start to take systematic control To be SOX compliant and for the purposes of internal audit you need to look at risk from a process perspective. You need to ensure your process is controlled and compliant. Mitzi Mitchell will share how to reduce risk to achieve systematic control of the highest P2P risk areas, including: Three-way matching errors Ensuring approval limits are correct and monitoring approval authority changes Minimising employee fraud (using Concur’s T & E tool) Avoiding duplicate payments (using APEX Analytics' audit recovery tool) Ensuring users in the process are following the rules to ensure compliance Mitzi Mitchell Accounts Payable Risk Manager T-Mobile

 

16.45  Still have procurement outside shared services? Ever ask yourself why? 
Creating a purchasing shared services is easier said than done. Unlike in an accounts payable shared service, it is often hard to instil a customer service mindset when moving from local procurement to serving business units remotely. Resistance will happen. In this session Jerker Gunnarsson will share how DHL overcame this to set up a shared purchasing service center for North America. He then discusses how to set up a global service delivery without losing the quality of service originally provided by local procurement.

Jerker Gunnarsson
Director Procurement Solutions Group
DHL Global Business Services

17.30 The speaker clinic

17:45 Chair’s close

18:00 Close of conference

 

DAY 2: Friday May 25th 2012

08:00 Registration and coffee

08:30 Take aways from day one that will change your P2P world
How can you learn so much in one day? It’s possible and during this opening session Susie will walk through the top ten learnings from day one.

Susie West
CEO
sharedserviceslink.com

09:00 Business cases are not a dark art: the science behind the numbers
Getting the business case right for any technology implementation is crucial to its future success. In this session, Todd Holcomb shares how Alliance Data prepared their business case, what difference this careful planning had on their initial e-invoicing campaign and key lessons learnt in their journey so far, including how to:

• Understand your current P2P process, identify opportunities for automation and target your future P2P process
• Elegantly gain the executive level buy-in and support to make your automation project a success
• Seamlessly handle non-PO invoices elegantly with your electronic invoicing solution

Todd Holcomb
Director, Supplier Services
Alliance Data

09:45 The shame of it – the forgotten territory of procure to pay
We are talking about the vendor master database. What are the impacts of bad data going across the organization? Whether your vendor database has grown organically or through mergers and acquisitions, poorly-integrated master data can cause serious operational problems in the areas of supplier satisfaction, operational efficiency, decision-support, and regulatory compliance. This session highlights where the quick wins are and how to ensure your vendor master database serves you.

10.30 Morning coffee

Streamed Sessions
STREAM A: Data capture and workflow 11.00 Gamification and social networking – gamechanging technologies changing the face of procure to pay New developments in technologies have the power to massively change the face of procure to pay. This session looks at 'gamification'. If you haven’t heard about this, read up. It’s technology based on rewarding good behaviour and SAP are all over it. They are looking at the social networking concept, like Facebook, and applying it to P2P, opening up function-wide and company-wide interest groups to facilitate super-fast mind-sharing and problem solving. Attend this exciting session to see how these kinds of technologies will change the face of your procure to pay in the future. Susie West CEO sharedserviceslink.com 11.30 Exceptions are inevitable. But does your struggle against them have to be? Struggling with resolving exceptions such as missing or incorrect purchase receipts, inaccurate POs, inconsistent invoice details or misrouted invoices? In this session, Simplot share their strategy for avoiding a high cost of re-work in handling exceptions, covering how to: Prevent exceptions from re-occuring in the future Implement key workflow technologies and hear Simplot’s key results from this combined strategy Gary Collins Senior Director Shared Services Simplot Kathleen Hamm Accounts Payable Manager Simplot   STREAM A: T&E expense reporting 12.00 T&E – total control across your organization Keeping track of all your company’s expenses manually is tough today as firms are running on an increasingly global basis with more employees needing T&E support. With a need for tight controls and visibility on T&E spend coupled with moving towards a paperless office, what are the options available? In this session, Christa Kelley from The Mosaic Company shares her experience in rolling out the Concur solution globally and examines in this session: The business case for your T&E solution and how to choose the right provider for you How to set up the controls you need to make your T&E solution really work Overcoming implementation challenges and training issues for you to consider Christa Kelley Shared Services Manager The Mosaic Company	OR	STREAM B: e-Invoicing 11.00 The easy bit: converting up to 50% of your invoice volumes to electronic Electronic invoicing can drive down the cost of invoice processing, improve cycle times and get suppliers to be compliant. Jessica Hill-Johnson shares how Amgen did this using both OB10’s and Ariba’s e-invoicing networks globally by discussing how to: Work closely with your global strategic sourcing organization and push aside competing priorities with accounts payable Set a governance structure to review P2P objectives, share common data and establish common metrics Realise a 20% cost reduction and enable other value-adding opportunities Jessica Hill-Johnson Director of Financial Disbursements Amgen 11.30 Beyond the low-hanging fruit: how to onboard those tougher suppliers to your e-invoicing program So you’ve taken care of your large suppliers. What about those suppliers that send only 50-300 invoices per year? Attend this session to hear how to: Enable your suppliers to have greater visibility of your invoice process Dramatically reduce your costs per invoice, even if you have outsourced your accounts payable process already Integrate your e-invoicing tool with your ERP to minimize manual intervention        STREAM B: e-Invoicing 12.00 The hard bit: moving from 50% to over 80% electronic volumes conversion In the previous session Jessica Hill-Johnson shared her journey to achieve 50% electronic conversion. Now she wants your help to achieve her new target of over 80% of invoices being processed electronically. Jessica shares her plans to achieve this and then the audience will discuss in breakout groups practical ideas on how to move to the next level of e-invoicing. Experienced and young e-invoicing users will be sharing ideas along with service providers, so make sure you don’t miss this incredible mind-sharing opportunity. Facilitated by: Jessica Hill-Johnson Director of Financial Disbursements Amgen

 

12.30 The speaker clinic
 

13.00 Networking lunch

 

Audit recovery

14.00 Claiming money back from suppliers – is it worth the effort?

The administrative burden for trying to recover lost funds from incorrect or duplicate payments to suppliers or claiming credit that has not yet been paid from them can put off most companies to even bother. So how can you maximize your audit recovery with minimum administrative burden? In this session, Blake Stewart and Alexander Hrnjez from Lafarge will share how they have successfully recovered almost $1 million in the first year of implementing an audit recovery solution from Lavante. Gain key lessons learnt from Blake and Alexander so you can:

• Select the right audit recovery solution for you
• Monitor the status activity of any supplier
• Communicate effectively to your business units to comply and accept new ways of working to maximize recovery

Blake Stewart
Director of Accounts Payable
Lafarge

Alexander Hrnjez
Manager of Accounts Payable
Lafarge

Streamed Sessions
STREAM A: Supplier portals 14:45 Interactive discussion: Have the suppliers do the work and make them happier simultaneously: the power of portals If suppliers have visibility into the timings of their payments through the payment process, even if they are not paid early, they can better manage their own cash position. So what technologies can enable this to strengthen your supplier relationships? In this session, discuss with your peers: How can accounts payable and procurement best work together to get the most out of supplier portals? What are the best ways to onboard the different types of suppliers you have onto your portal? What do you want a supplier portal to do? Facilitated by: Matthew Garrow-Fisher Head of Research sharedserviceslink.com	OR	STREAM B: Centralized payment systems 14.45 The payment traffic control tower: seeing the full picture to track your cash position How do you manage your payments if you operate in a multibank, multi-ERP environment? The IT costs alone can be very expensive indeed, not to mention the bank charges you may receive. If you want to keep track of your cash position, provide detailed audit trails to be legally compliant and stay in control, attend this session to see how others are gaining central visibility to their payments.

15.30 Afternoon Refreshments

Supply chain finance

 16.00 Supply chain finance models Part 1: bank-agnostic models, bank-funded and managed approaches

So maybe you are efficient in your invoice handling process. What should you do next? GlaxoSmithKline has rolled out a global supply chain finance program with a global financial institution after successfully implementing e-invoicing programs in the US and UK. In this session, Sean McDermott reveals how to:

• Fix your standard payment terms at 60 days or more whilst keeping suppliers happy
• Improve suppliers’ cash flow and help your working capital position even if you are in a slow-payer market
• Implement your supply chain finance program on a global scale

Sean McDermott
Manager of North America Accounts Payable and Treasury Services
GlaxoSmithKline

Stephen Kunz
Director of Corporate Finance
GlaxoSmithKline

16.45 How can you keep control when outsourcing part or all of your procure-to-pay process

Bank-based supply chain finance models can be highly effective methods to optimize your working capital. But what if your bank restricted funds to your organization due to a change in risk appetite? You could ask your bank to act as a broker to find other banks to cover the shortfall in funding availability. But this restricts your control and can be expensive. So what other options are there? Doug Schoch reveals Siemens' approach by sharing how to:

• Work with a third party platform (Orbian) to allow institutions to show interest and set credit risk spreads and price in your company’s short-term obligations
• Bundle the flow of receivables from your suppliers with several institutions
• Create increased competition between institutions to lower risk and prices

Douglas Schoch
VP Relationship Manager
Captive Business,
Siemens

17.30 Chair’s summation and close of conference 

17.45  The speaker clinic

 

 

sharedserviceslink.com is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors.  State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit.  Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.learningmarket.org.

The Annual Procure-to-Pay Leaders' Meeting

May 23rd – 25th  2012, Chicago

PRE-CONFERENCE LEARNING LABS DAY:

Wednesday May 23rd 2012

 

Choose up to three learning labs to attend from A, B, and C:

Learning Lab A: e-Invoicing 2.0 - the art of e-invoicing

e-Invoicing is recognised as the future of processing invoice transactions. Businesses are now asking: how do I improve my AP process beyond simply taking out mailroom costs?

How do I achieve maximum supplier participation?

There is a range of critical factors to achieving success in your e-invoicing programme. Donna Weaver will take you through a step-by-step process to ensuring success, including:

• Benchmark yourself: take the e-invoicing readiness assessment
• Understanding your project scope
• Building a business case for success and mitigate risks
• Setting the right targets and putting best practices in place to follow them through
• The critical factors to onboard suppliers
• International considerations
• Learning from the experience of other organizations

Learning Lab facilitator: Donna Weaver OB10

Learning Lab B: The procure-to-pay automation business case: enabling business commerce collaboration for world-class results

The limited success of many procure-to-pay automation initiatives result from tackling parts of the process while ignoring the whole. Today, by connecting your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other back office systems to a business commerce network, you can broaden the scope of P2P automation to include all spend categories and all suppliers, and improve compliance by driving approvals prior to purchase. Join us in this learning lab as we explain how to build a P2P business case that can streamline your P2P operations and better align procurement and accounts payable. More specifically, you will learn how you can:

• Reduce procure-to-pay operating costs by 70%, and drive supplier participation
• Ensure compliance with processes, negotiated prices and contracts
• Achieve touchless invoice processing rates of 98%
• Save $3 million or more for every $1 billion in spend from early payment discounts
• Strengthen supplier relationships while supporting your efforts to negotiate favourable pricing and payment terms
• Define objectives for your P2P program, and measure the results
• Benchmark your organisation's performance against industry and peer groups

Learning Lab facilitator: Drew Hofler Ariba Inc.

Learning Lab C: From supplier on-boarding to recovery audits: how to really automate those manual P2P processes

How can technology be effectively applied to your organization to reduce those manual, resource-intensive processes? Can you automate while improving the quality of your vendor files AND drive hard dollars to your bottom line? This learning lab will review best practice approaches to applying new technology offerings to streamline your vendor management processes, leading to the ability to perform a comprehensive, automated recovery audit process. With end-user experience shared from a fortune 1000 company you will gain very practical advice, and roundtable discussions will explore what are current best practice methodologies. Attend this learning lab to examine:

• The benefits of deploying supplier portal systems that streamline connections to and help manage your supplier base
• Issues surrounding vendor file cleansing using technology that is flexible and scalable to accommodate even the largest vendor master files
• A recovery audit process that builds on the vendor portal and continuously cleanses vendor master files
• Best practice methodologies and case study examples of how these systems work together

Learning Lab facilitator: Sherry DePew Lavante

 

sharedserviceslink.com is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors.  State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit.  Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.learningmarket.org.

The Annual Procure-to-Pay Leaders' Meeting

May 23rd – 25th 2012, Chicago

 

Package	Really Really early bird Registered and paid by 2/03/2012	Really early bird Registered and paid by 3/16/2012	Early bird Registered and paid by 4/20/2012	Standard prices
Premium Plus conference + 3 Learning Labs	50% off $1649.50	Save $500 $2,799	Save $300 $2,999	$3,299
Premium conference + 2 Learning Labs	50% off $1449.50	Save $400 $2,499	Save $200 $2,699	$2,899
Standard Plus conference + 1 Learning Labs	50% off $1224.50	Save $300 $2,149	Save $150 $2,299	$2,449
Standard conference only	50% off $999.50	Save $200 $1,799	Save $100 $1,899	$1,999
Vendor pass*				$2500

Please note - prices in the registration process are converted to GBP using the ratio 1GBP=1.568USD.
* Limited vendor places are available to non end-user delegates .

Click here to view the special rates we have negotiated with The W Hotel, Chicago.

 

 

 

 

sharedserviceslink.com is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors.  State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit.  Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.learningmarket.org.

 

Bring your team! sharedserviceslink.com understands the value of team knowledge sharing. Groups booking at the same time from the same company receive the following discounts (discounts apply to the full price only and cannot be applied retrospectively). Only one discount is applicable per non-member. In order to qualify for the early bird discounts, bookings must be received with payment before stated date. We do not combine discounts but we will honour the discount that is better for you. To make a group booking call +1-646-845-7349

Bring your team! Teams of 2 10% discount Teams of 3 15% discount Teams of 4 20% discount Teams of 5 25% discount Teams of 6 30% discount Teams of 7 35% discount Teams of 8 40% discount

Satisfaction guarantee at sharedserviceslink.com We are absolutely confident that you will receive value for money. To give this belief credence we are offering a money-back guarantee if you feel you have not experienced value for money from attending our events. There is no catch. To qualify for this you need to ensure you liaise with Susie West directly before the end of the conference, and that you attend all conference sessions over the two days. Learning Labs are not included in this guarantee. All refunds will deduct a 10% administration fee.