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NINA HANSELMAN: Well, hello and welcome to our final Commercial Real Estate Deposit and Payment Solution Webinar in 2021. Hard to believe we're there. This is a digital transformation series, and I really wanted you to take a moment to think about where are you in your accounts payable digital transformation journey.  

My name is Nina Hanselman, and I'm a working capital consultant with U.S. Bank. And my team works closely with the relationship teams that you do, consulting with clients on digital transformation strategies, optimizing your processes with the best solutions, especially for accounts payable and receivables needs. So today we've invited our client, Lindsey Walter, which we're going to be talking with her about CSM corporation and about their journey and how they leveraged their ERP implementation to take a new look in the ways that they were making payments.  

And I will tell you that their journey-- and she'll say the satisfying results-- has really positioned them with an end-to-end accounts payable solution really that establishes a foundation for future growth for them. So I really would like to introduce you first to Lindsey, and she is the senior manager for accounting operations with CSM corporation. And really, I've had the pleasure of working with Lindsey and CSM for over the past six years, and she has been on a continuous quest to improve processes at CSM.  

And she really, she has an approach to payables which elevates industry standards through optimization automation and allowing unique vendor to client experiences. So through introducing new technology and strategic alternatives for mainstream, she really has been able to increase efficiencies and streamline processes. So with systems and implementation background, she's had significant expertise in change management. She really is a change agent, and I've watched her do it.  

So she brings 10 years of experience centered, really, on increasing efficiency, while being at the cutting edge with some of the payables technology. So before we get started it and she starts to really share the story, I wanted her to give you a quick overview of CSM to better understand the frame of reference that she's going to talk about today. Lindsey?  

LINDSEY WALTER: Thanks, Nina. I'm excited to be here today. CSM is a really neat company. We have a diverse portfolio that's made up of really three large business lines. We have our hospitality business lines, where we have hotels all over the country. We have multifamily residential properties also spanning across the country. And then we also have a significant commercial portfolio with a lot of our commercial properties spanning across the country as well.  

So with our portfolio, we have a mix of different needs for payables as it pertains to certain time frames that we have to meet to make those payments. And then we also have that opposite need more on the commercial side where we have some very large payments that are going out for some of our tenant improvements and things like that. So diverse in our portfolios, diverse in our payables as well.  

NINA HANSELMAN: So today we really want you to learn some things of what Lindsey has gone through with her team and to give you some thoughts and probably some tips and some good best practices and some learnings. All those reasons why you want to talk to Lindsey and not to me. So let's just jump in. And I really thought maybe if you would just share with us where you and the CSM team really started. The state of the nation where you were.  

LINDSEY WALTER: Yeah, absolutely. So we were an industry-- we were kind of a shooting star in the industry as it pertains to our electronic payments. We continuously run payments each week, depending on what our payment strategy is. Elevating everything that we can to make sure that it's as electronic as we possibly can with our diverse vendor master file that we have. We identified a need that we were going to be changing an ERP system, and that is pre-pandemic, and that led us to a lot of other things that will unfold.  

NINA HANSELMAN: OK, so you had how many ERP systems? One, two, if I remember.  

LINDSEY WALTER: Yeah, we were working with two. And between those two, we were looking at a lot of manual interfaces. So a lot of our calendar reminders, where a person would have to work around their lunch period, work around their day to make sure that we were able to upload and download, import, export manual files to get to and from each piece of our system from workflow to ERP.  

NINA HANSELMAN: OK, so just to give everybody a feel for where you were just in that payment scenario, pre-conversion to the new ERP system, about what percentage of your payments were electronic?  

LINDSEY WALTER: We were looking at about 87% of all of our payment disbursements were electronic. So it really just left our government entities as people that were receiving physical checks.  

NINA HANSELMAN: OK, and then just from your perspective, the pros and cons of that, where were you going to focus next if you had not been on this ERP journey?  

LINDSEY WALTER: We were going to continue to then leverage-- because we were doing those electronic payments, we had really good relationships with all of our vendors, which means we had that opportunity, and we were sitting in that position to be able to negotiate better terms, better pricing, be able to really control how we handled those vendor relationships. Because we could and we had a really good relationship and a really good reputation for our aging and our payables to be on time. It was awesome.  

NINA HANSELMAN: So that's an important piece about the control that you have with electronic payments. OK, so let's move on to just focus about ERP selection. Because I know a lot of clients are going through this, either upgrading or choosing a new one and that conversion. So it might be a good idea probably to start with what were your top three priorities.  

LINDSEY WALTER: Yeah, so our top three priorities, one, we had to reduce those manual interfaces. Those times that we had on our calendars of the manual importing and exporting, the manipulation of files. There's opportunity for human error there. There's opportunity to miss things, and then there's opportunities for some errors there. So we needed something to reduce the manual interfaces so it was more systemic and controlled by the system.  

Another thing we wanted to do is create transparency. So AP, obviously, in most organizations as well is that customer service hub. People within your organization and your vendors are going to be looking to you for, what is payment-- what are the payment details here? Has this cleared? Has this not?  

A lot of our inquiries that we were receiving were from our internal clients who are peers and other individuals that work for our company. We wanted to create some transparency that helped give some self-service and also elevated a little bit of that research for them too. So we wanted to have something that would allow for our end users to go and they could look either from an invoice perspective, if that's where they're comfortable with, drill to the GL or vice versa.  

Maybe our accountants are more used to looking at the GL and the income statement, and they want to see exactly what that payable is that created that entry. They can continue to click through hyperlink and hyperlink and land all the way back down to the invoice all based on self-servicing. So that was huge.  

And then the third one is we wanted to utilize some intuitive technology. We had a lot of manual processes before, so we wanted to be able to have that capability to store and remember and have the system say, you know what, I think you've coded in this place before. I think you might want to code it here. Or can I help you create a template, and the system would say, let's take a look at what you've coded this based on the last couple of months. And you can actually take a copy of that and make a template that can be applied to future invoices and future bills that come in month after month, significantly reducing keystrokes and touches for our AP team and for our approvers as well.  

NINA HANSELMAN: So three great priorities there. So the next thing we always have to think about is, as we're moving through these conversions, is about managing that process and then leading that. What are some of the things that you believe that your fellow practitioners should really focus on or in their approach to selecting an ERP system?  

LINDSEY WALTER: Let it be a fun process. There are people within your organization who are passionate about change as well. Everybody strives in a different department. Just because our ERP system is accounting-driven and based off of our AP processes, we have IT who loves to help reduce those manual steps, increase some efficiencies.  

We have other key stakeholders, decision makers that have certain opinions and experiences that said, from this perspective, this would be elevated if we could do something like that. So take this as an opportunity to identify who would be your impacted people. Who would you want to have at the table next to you, and leverage that as a partnership opportunity to ensure that your implementation is not full of silos, and you're in a room collaborating with one group after the other from the get go, instead of starting and making decisions and then bringing people in after the fact.  

You may have to do some rework there, but I think it brings a lot of energy and you also get a lot of buy-in. And obviously, as we all know, buy-in is a difficult thing to get. Change is tough. And so if you have that buy-in from your key players at the beginning, then your implementation gets a lot of traction and a lot of energy. And by the time you're ready to go live, it is something to be celebrated.  

So identifying your key players, who your partners are going to be, and even some of your potential super users. So who are going to be your loudest approver? Who's your loudest person that's coding it? Engage with them from the get go, and you can make this really fun and most importantly, really efficient.  

NINA HANSELMAN: Perfect. Those are some really good tips. So as you got into the conversion, there really was an impact to payments, and this is the part where I think we were all involved. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about that, what the plan was, and then what came up.  

LINDSEY WALTER: So Nina, we had a very substantial impact to our electronic payments during the time that we were going live into our implementation of our ERP system. From that 87% electronic payments, we then reverted to 100% checks. Because what we had found out was that our ERP system we were so excited to have that integrated technology for them to be able to issue electronic payments for our vendors was actually not able to support the dollar size transactions that we would need to be able to do so frequently to a lot of our vendors.  

So we were able to utilize this time in a couple of ways. I knew in my back pocket, through the resources that I had, that we had other options. We had backup options if this was not going to work out, and one of those options was our AP optimizer option, which was going to allow us to bring back electronic payments in an elevated kind of platform. Bringing a lot more benefits to our vendors based on their size and the type of business that they do with us.  

Which put myself and my team in a really neat position to engage our vendors, take a look at what type of business do we do with them. Are they a mom and pop shop? Are they a big vendor? Are we paying them 50 invoices each time we do a payment?  

There is something that we were able to offer our vendors that actually was specific to each one of them that now they all love. And they bounce back and forth between trying a couple, which has been really neat to be able to see our vendors so engaged in that. So while it was a rather difficult time in that implementation, knowing that we were going to try to do this one stop shop, there wasn't a need for panic because we knew what resources we had, and we had that backup plan.  

So we were able to have the conversations with the vendors during this time of our implementation and right after we went live to say, we are pausing our electronic payments. They'll be receiving a check, but we are going to be bringing back electronic payments. And when we did, we brought it back in that elevated way to give them options of a couple different types of ACH or a virtual credit card, and that actually made the transition in our relationship with our vendors a lot stronger.  

NINA HANSELMAN: So that relates back then to the things you were looking for, which was better transparency in the invoicing and being able to use some intuitive technology so that was a win-win for you and your vendors. And then that last piece, additional resources for enrollment and helping get these vendors back on to electronic payments. So it was an interruption but something that helped. Step back now and let's just talk a little bit about the lessons learned, both from ERP and all the things that hang off an ERP system, and what are some of the things that you would advise people to think about?  

LINDSEY WALTER: So through our implementation in our project plan, we're going to coin a phrase called "benefit blindness." And what that was were those key words that were really important to myself and to CSM and what our goals were outside of this project and what we could get out of this project. And one of those things was to continue those electronic payments and to reduce the interfaces.  

And so the idea of being able to have a system, an ERP system that's going to contain our workflow, contain our invoices, contain all of our GL information and reporting can also issue electronic payments for us. We were on cloud nine, and that's things that were important to us. That blindness comes in because we heard electronic payments, we heard that it was all integrated. We didn't go into the details to look at what size are those dollar limit transactions.  

Is that going to be an issue for us? Is that going to be an impact to how we will generate our payments while also keeping control of our policies and procedures? And so that was a big thing that we got was that benefit blindness as soon. As we heard it, we thought it was great, and that was going to be our plan going forward.  

Another lesson learned is just always knowing that you have a backup in your back pocket. And whether that is an alternative solution that you've looked at or a relationship gap, that you have, a lot of times between the two of those, you'll be able to come up with a solution very quickly, and you'll be able to time it appropriately with what your project plan is.  

And then the most important thing that I think going through this implementation and the lesson learned is to be an advocate for your company's goals, and then how are these solutions going to support those goals? And you can be an advocate for your company's goals while also being open-minded and being excited about the potential for some new technology or thinking outside of the box. But as long as you stick to your company's goals at your core, then you'll know as you make the decision and how these support the goals, it'll be more easy to get some of that buy-in as well.  

NINA HANSELMAN: OK, makes sense to me. OK, so you were at 87%, and that was all ACH.  

LINDSEY WALTER: Yep.  

NINA HANSELMAN: And now where are you as you're moving through this implementation with this new payment strategy?  

LINDSEY WALTER: We're at about 60% and climbing. We have some additional stuff in the future that's going to get us closer. My goal is to get to somewhere in the low 90s for our electronic payments.  

NINA HANSELMAN: And checks, what do you expect to do with those?  

LINDSEY WALTER: We will probably in the next year start looking at some strategies as far as maybe extending out some payment terms for our vendors that are really hard on continuing to receive checks from us. And look at what other alternative solutions, what other areas of accounts payable optimization product that we can explore and bring in now that we have a really solid foundation.  

NINA HANSELMAN: OK, last thing. Now that you have something scalable, you've got something very scalable that integrates with the ERP system, what's the future short-term goal?  

LINDSEY WALTER: Business to consumer payments. We have--  

NINA HANSELMAN: Oh, music to my ears.  

LINDSEY WALTER: We have a lot of those through our diverse portfolio that business to consumer payments is going to be something that is not only going to kick up our percentage of electronic payments, but it's also going to reduce some checks that we get returned in the mail, checks that we need to do stop payments on, and reissues. And we are very excited to bring that on shortly after the holidays here.  

NINA HANSELMAN: Good. Well I hope at some point you and I will have an opportunity to maybe revisit this group and talk about what you do next with the B2C. And perhaps by then, you'll have taken on the idea of utilizing real-time payments and the request for payment capability in the consumer environment. So as we move forward, I'm going to just dangle that out there that you and I have the opportunity to do this again. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to share the journey with automation really with all of us today.  

And it's very clear to me this was a really large undertaking for your team because I watched it from beginning to end. And I want to thank the audience that joined us today. So hope that you found some information from Lindsey that was helpful when you think about your company's AP automation journey and ERP conversion.  

So if you'd please take a few minutes just to complete the survey after this webcast, and we really value your feedback. And I know you know this, but especially on the webinars and some ideas for future topics, we're always very open to that. So finally, I just want to wish all of you and your families a safe and healthy upcoming holiday season. And gosh, soon will be saying, "Happy New Year" too. So thank you for joining us today, and again thank you, Lindsey.  

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