landscape and existing systems architecture, and to complement and enhance the status quo.”
A perfect fit
That is reflected in the experience of Laurent Gueritaine, global process owner, customer invoicing to cash at Sanofi.
When the French pharma giant was looking to adapt and align processes across its global operations, it called on HighRadius for support. “Most of the issue was actually more in the aligning of the organisation across several dimensions on the selection of a best of breed technology, and on the efficiencies that we were trying to achieve through that implementation,” he explains.
“There wasn’t really an incentive to change your process, as a consequence a lot of ERP implementations were quite lengthy.”
For Sanofi, as for others, one of the principle tools in the transformation is automation, where automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks can represent a step change away from older, more traditional processes. Naturally, there is a growing clamour among finance teams to drive further automation. But Hullait says that while recent years have seen a great deal of hype in this field, CFOs must understand that in fact there exists a spectrum of automation. “For instance,” he says, “you’ve got simple SQL scripts on one hand, along with RPA and the like, all the way through to AI. If you look at RPA, for example, typically that is what is happening, people will stand up POCs or even implement RPA-type technologies,
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which often fixes the issues within the process.” For HighRadius, however, simply automating the status quo represents a huge missed opportunity. “I think the old adage still holds true: you should re-engineer the process and then look into applying the technology.” However you cannot re-engineer without having a target technology in mind, otherwise its blank cheque with no end state. The tech makes the process of reenineering real.
Best in class
Having said that, things are changing. “In the past you had legacy systems and often you could almost break them to fit your processes,” Hullait explains. Now, however, new technologies, like those employed by HighRadius, incorporate what many would define as the best in class process. “There wasn’t really an incentive to change your processes,” Hullait continues, “and as a consequence a lot of ERP implementations were quite lengthy and also very expensive with the development work that was ongoing in order to fit technology to, in essence, what was a bad process.” Now, however, with cloud technologies limited in terms of what extra functionality they can bolt onto existing ERPs, the scope for customisation of that technology is limited. “And that’s where we come in; we’re filling the gaps,” Hullait says. “We complement a lot of these technologies like SAP and Oracle in terms of the functionalities that they offer. Historically, their raison d’etre has been accounting, so when you start looking at the peripheral activities around accounting, we go deeper into those technologies and we’ve got better functionality, which can be additive. But then it also drives out best in class processes, because you’re not then breaking the technology to fix a bad process.”
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
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