REPOST: Find IAPP FUSION 2010 videos on youtube
Wow! If you have not already seen them online, IAPP has posted a number of videos relating to FUSION 2010. They have been professionally produced and the do a great job capturing the energy of the week long event. Whether you were there and you want to relve the fun or if you missed out and you want to see what everyone is buzzing about: Follow the link to FUSION Videos to view all the fun.
REPOST:
Lavante CEO, Joe Flynn successfully got Lavante Connect kick-started in front of the “IAPP Emerging Technology Tour” in the FUSION 2010 exhibit hall on Tuesday Morning filled with approximately 1600 financial professionals. Earliest reactions have been fantastic and FUSION attendees flooded the booth to review a demonstration of the new products and platform.
(See Joe below presenting to the crowd. Look closely you can just catch a glimpse of Elvis peaking over someone’s head)
Lavante CEO, Joe Flynn addresses IAPP crowd during Lavante Connect Launch!
Sherry DePew followed Joe’s lead with a standing room only workshop where she discussed portals and demonstrated the Lavante Connect self-service supplier portal. She was held after her session by attendees with lingering question for about thirty minutes.
This is a game changer! Proud of the new developments and proud to be a Lavantine!
Just how well do most supplier diversity programs work? A new study by research firm The Hackett Group indicates that many companies make several key errors in managing these initiatives. To start, too few focus on developing programs that further their corporate goals. Instead, they may focus on meeting certain numbers, or gaining recognition from their customers or within their industries. Not bad goals, to be sure, but they may not provide all the value that a more comprehensive approach might. Even when the programs align with corporate objectives, management often fails to ensure alignment at the operational level.
In addition, most rely on overly simplistic measures to evaluate their programs, Hackett found. For instance, about 90 percent of organizations track their percentage of spending with diverse suppliers. However, fewer than half the study participants track the percentage of overall suppliers that is made up of diverse suppliers. Moreover, only 10 percent analyze the impact of their supplier diversity efforts on revenue or market share. (more…)
While I was doing some research online about accounts payable technology, I stumbled across an article on employee motivation. No idea how the two subjects converged, but the ideas discussed in the paper made so much sense, yet go against so much of the conventional wisdom, that I thought them worth mentioning here.
The authors and researchers behind the paper are Teresa Amabile, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, and Steven J. Kramer, an independent researcher in Wayland, Mass. A summary of their work is available in this article in the January-February issue of Harvard Business Review.
To start, the two asked 600 managers to rank five tools commonly used to motivate employees, such as incentives and recognition. The winner, according to the managers? “Recognizing employees for good work, either in public or private.” After all, who doesn’t like to be appreciated? (more…)
If your firm is like most, management considers business travel a necessary, albeit expensive, tool to achieving its goals. Now, some firms are taking a more strategic look at T&E, according to a new report from AberdeenGroup. Those that do are rewarded with higher compliance to corporate travel policies, as well as lower costs to process invoices.
As a starting point, more than half (54 percent) of the 175 organizations responding now view expense management as a “mid-level strategic function that can drive moderate value to the overall organization.” That’s a shift from the previously held conventional wisdom, which held that T&E is simply a sunk cost. (more…)
Recovery Auditing Misconception #4: I don’t have the time or resources to support this process
The Short Answer:
It takes very little of your time or resources to support a Lavante recovery audit. All you need do is send a basic vendor file and dedicate one employee for typically an hour per week.
How is this possible?
To begin an audit: Lavante can get started working from a data file that in many instances requires less than an hour for clients to generate. AP typically can create the data file Lavante needs and client IT does not need to get involved. This is all that’s required for a full recovery audit.
To support an ongoing audit: Clients working with Lavante typically require less than one hour per week to receive and upload verified claims and vendor file updates into their system. No onsite Lavante personnel are ever needed to support the effort.
Clients who wish to save additional time can work with their Lavante Account Manager to integrate claims directly into their ERP system. Lavante will automatically match claims against an internal credit listing, thus pre-checking the credits and enabling clients to upload credits directly as ledger entries with no manual intervention.
Lavante InSight™
For companies concerned about the time commitment or skeptical of the potential benefits of performing a recovery audit, Lavante offers a way for clients to test and sample the service before fully engaging.
Lavante InSight™ gives you a view of the recovery audit you might have. It generates an estimate of the likely cash recoveries and vendor updates you will receive if you choose to engage in a Lavante Strategic Recovery audit. Utilizing your master vendor file, InSight leverages Lavante’s extensive database of historical audit detail, a proprietary, on-demand software application and our Supplier Network of over two million companies to develop a comprehensive vendor and recovery analysis. InSight previews potential cash recoveries, duplicate and related vendors, recovery projections over time, vendor updates, and more.
If you think LEGOs are strictly for the sippy-cup and coloring book set, guess again. Ron McRae built a functioning ATM from LEGO bricks. According to the description on www.MOCpages.com, a website dedicated to LEGO aficionados, the machine is built completely from LEGO parts. That includes the internal systems, such as an RFID sensor, that are sold through LEGO.
McRae’s Brick Bank can accept deposits, dispense cash and make change. It also can be calibrated to accept any type of bank note, sports a functional numeric keypad, saves the customer database after each transaction and will keep the user’s ATM card if the wrong password is entered three times.
According to this video on YouTube, McRae spent four months, used 8,000 LEGOs and wrote 1,800 lines of code to build the machine. Its weight is estimated at 22 pounds.
Vendor credit benchmarking from the front lines.
Every industry has its fair share of reports, surveys, data points, and sound bites. The Profit Recovery industry is no different. In the last few years we have performed quite a bit of analysis and benchmarking to uncovered some compelling data about recovering credits from your vendors and suppliers.
From a survey of over 100 clients and prospects we have discovered that most traditional recovery providers sample only the top 5-20% of your vendor population when reviewing vendor-side credits? Our survey elaborates (based on feed back from AP professionals) that without the aid of a communication compliance engine (Lavante is the only firm with such an app.) traditional statement audit reviews, whether they are done by third party firms or by internal efforts simply cannot support indepth vendor penetration with manual methods and cap out at 20%.
Our vendor credit recovery benchmarking demonstrates that 61% of vendor credit opportunity resides in the lower 80% of your vendor file. To put it another way, traditional manual methods, will find, at most, 39% of credits available to you.
Another fact you may not be aware of is that 37% of vendor-side claims come from product returns. This category is by far the largest we are tracking. And it has huge implications not only to the existing process you have for returns transactions, but also on where your profit recovery audits should focus. In contrast, we’ve found that only 9% of vendor-side claims are the result of duplicate payments. Keep in mind that hese numbers vary depending on industry.
Some other interesting metrics indicate that the average claim amount from a vendor credit recovery review is $817. (with a range of about $400-$1200) We have also discovered that the actual recovery potential for vendor credit recovery is $600,000 -$900,000 per $1Billion in addressable spend volume. Although we are the only recovery provider to project recoveries below the typical industry benchmark ($1M per $1B in spend) we feel confident that this carefully calculated metric passes both the scientific test and a gut test as well. When we approach new prospects and we explain that depending on their industry they stand to recovery within this range that data is always well received based on what they have actually seen from other firms and not what they have been promised.
Based on our discoveries, we have also determined that for every month you do not perform an in depth automated vendor credit review you risk losing $63,000 per billion dollars of spend with no chance of recovering it. While $63,000 may not be a huge amount for you, if you spend multiple billions of dollars, and delay just a quarter’s time, that $63,000 figure becomes a large sum of money.
If you have any more questions about our benchmarking survey please join the conversation…
On Wednesday, we released a straight forward news story about our Q1 success: Recovery Audit Technology Leader Lavante Continues Record Growth. The story reported that we are growing quickly and that we are moving to a new larger facilty in San Jose. The story was very direct and did not elaborate on too many details. I was suprised by a volume of incoming emails and calls asking for more details. On Wednesday alone I heard from three clients and three reporter/analysts. More emails and calls continue to make there way in…
I’d like to elaborate a little bit more on the story for the Lavante watchers in the audience. Our new grade A facility is in the Santa Teresa area of San Jose and the property manger tells me it is over 26,000 square feet! I do not want to risk a blister trying to walk through and measure it myself. We plan to have our entire operation moved over in a couple months, but we are in the middle of three major trade events in the next month and we are rolling out a brand new product in three weeks so some of us are having a hard time packing our boxes. (uh-oh… more phone call and emails from that “new product” teaser I am sure)
Regarding new business… how do I put this? As the articles inicates, Q1 was a record quarter, but we’ve nearly already beat it in April alone. Yes you read that correctly. Clients are closing more quickly and they are growing larger in size… In 2010 we have begun workng with three of the largest private companies in the U.S. and our new public clients are averaging a Fortune rating of F297.
I hope that answers any questions, but I am always available to discuss further.
Recovery Auditing Misconception #3: Profit Recovery is not a current Priority and I can afford to wait.
The Short Answer
You may not be aware of it, but credits age and disappear over time. Once gone, they can’t be recovered. Our results show that delaying Lavante’s review could cost your company $62,500 per month for every billion dollars of your annualized spend. That’s for every month you delay.
Why?
Lavante’s core product focuses on the AR balances of your vendors and discovers credits that you didn’t even know existed. However, vendors are constantly reconciling and cleaning their AR records. Unapplied credits have a “shelf-life:” as they age and go unclaimed, they’re applied by the vendor to offset unrelated disputed invoices or unearned discounts, or eventually written-off. Unlike client AP records, there often isn’t a historic database that preserves ledger entries after they have been removed. Thus, if a vendor removes a credit from their AR record, then it’s usually lost with no possibility of recovery.
Lavante’s exhaustive benchmarking metrics point to a number of reasons why it is vital to begin the review immediately.
1.877.LAVANTE