Read our interview with Pagero and find out what impact they're making in the shared services industry!

Our event theme revolves around proving your value every day. How would you say your organization has set itself apart from its competition and what value does it bring to the industry?

Shared service organizations (SSOs) understand the need to optimize processes to boost productivity. Specifically, when it comes to optimizing their accounts payable and accounts receivable, it’s common that organizations are looking at optimizing one of these processes at a time. While it’s good that they are looking to improve productivity, focusing on one of these at a time is limiting and inefficient.

We help companies surpass these limitations by digitalizing the full end-to-end processes – one solution for their entire AP to AR process. This helps SSOs fulfill their long-term strategies, creating a sustainable and proactive solution.

Our AP solution automates the first and most crucial step of the AP process, helping organizations fully streamline their workflow, approval and payment routines. With this, we help SSOs:

• Improve data accuracy

• Enable straight-through processing

• Reduce manual data entry

• Improve track and traceability

• Provide better overview of company spend

Our AR solution mirrors similar benefits. By digitalizing their AR process, SSOs can:

• Achieve standardized invoice output and distribution

• Reduce the need for manual resources in the billing process

• Fulfill regulatory & local requirements to become and stay compliant, globally

• Eliminate various customer portals & manual entry

• Reduce days sales outstanding

• Improve track, traceability and reporting

What is the top challenge facing the industry today and how do you suggest overcoming those challenges?

When it comes to financial processes, all key decisions and outcomes start with accessing the right data. Many SSOs want to digitalize their processes to save resources, but in order to enable full functionality of their approval systems, it’s critical for them to not overlook the first step - getting accurate data into their systems. The first step of the buying or selling process is usually having someone manually key in information - whether it’s before they send it out to a buyer, or manually keying data into their AP system. The more manual work involved in a process, the bigger the risk for errors. That’s why it’s so important to digitalize and automate this first step. Accurate input data is key in order to fully enable the rest of your workflow process and eliminate exception handling.

Another challenge would be lack of standardization. In today’s world, SSOs are facing more hurdles than just managing various e-invoice regulatory requirements. Clearance models, interoperability, PEPPOL, portals, industry-specific EDI, paper distribution, and PDF distribution are just a few of the various channels that require constant attention, maintenance, and support. A lacking integrated strategy can lead to even more tedious manual processes, decreased productivity and wasted resources. Finding a partner that will help standardize these activities will save you plenty of time, cut costs and help your SSO manage more volume.

Shared services is progressing at a rapid rate. What steps is your company taking to stay at the forefront of the industry?

We’re helping SSOs stay ahead of the technological curve by taking a holistic and global operational approach. SSOs need a true partner to help streamline their full end-to-end financial processes and standardize any channels they must comply to in order to keep up with the rest of their operations. Many partners can take care of one process, but to be sustainable and to stay ahead of future technology changes, it’s best to have one partner that can help optimize both AP and AR through one solution. How are you going to digitalize your P2P process without having a solution to digitalize your suppliers’ O2C process, and vice versa?

In addition, when SSOs do business with their trading partners, each has a different process, format and method. Therefore, standardization is key to operational success. In order to stay on top of the countless methods, they need a true partner that can help streamline each channel – regardless of the changing local, regional, federal, and industry requirements.

What value do you believe SSOW contributes to the shared services community?

We are amazed at how SSOW brings the shared services community all in one place to network, share ideas, and navigate the industry, together. As a cross-collaborative industry, it’s ever more important to come together to help each other out and constantly build innovation. We believe that the power of an organization comes from their people. And to see the synergy of such a motivated, knowledgeable and collaborative group such as SSON to come together during SSOW is truly inspiring. We are proud to be a part of SSOW’s mission to of helping keep SSO leaders ahead of the curve on technology, latest industry trends, and news.

What are your predictions for the shared services landscape?

The world is going digital and SSOs all around the world will have to keep up with all the standards and improvements that come with digital transformation. But in order to fully digitalize, SSOs need to standardize their financial and operational processes. Now more than ever is it important to be proactive in their long-term strategy. To keep up, adopting solutions that can support a global model will boost productivity to win back time and resources as they grow. But whichever systems that a company plans to digitalize first, they should always ask themselves – how are we ensuring we’re accessing the right data?