Lavante Recovery is the industry’s premier statement audit product.  The Lavante Recovery application and services are built on the industry’s most powerful platform for communicating with suppliers, collecting AR data, discovering credits and delivering recoveries to clients.  Lavante Recovery targets the entire addressable supplier population without bias and commonly achieves compliance rates above 90%.  It is systematically impossible for any other competitive statement audit process to out-recover Lavante’s process.

Lavante’s outreach includes initial and ongoing requests for AR data as well as follow up requests for non-compliant suppliers.  Follow-up requests alternate by email, fax, mail and phone to maximize exposure and response rates.   Lavante electronically archives all incoming documentation and data per supplier per client for retrieval at any time. Dedicated auditors review all documents for potential credits and communicate directly with the supplier to secure written verification of all claims.  Recoveries are delivered to clients via an on-demand application in weekly batches accompanied by supporting documents and communication detail.

Based on ten years of benchmarking, Lavante has determined that 61% of credit-generating suppliers are distributed throughout the lower 80% of a company’s addressable vendor master file.  Through their expansive review, Lavante delivers clients between $600,000 and $900,000 per every $1 Billion audited.  In addition, Lavante delivers a complete suite of supplier reports and best practice recommendations for vendor file management.

The biggest challenge to maintaining the quality of your supplier data is its near immediate decay after being recorded.  Suppliers constantly undergo mergers, purges, acquisitions and employee churn that challenge the integrity of their data.  Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) reports its database of businesses experiences annual changes of 20% for addresses, 17% for business names, and 18% for phone numbers underscoring how quickly and frequently supplier data decays.  ERP systems perform some data quality measures at the time a supplier is set up, but they do little to preserve the integrity of the data over time.  ERP systems are reliant on quality data, but they do not ensure it.

Allowing your supplier data to decay over time is very costly to your enterprise. Inaccurate data delays implementation of ERP systems and other automated solutions and can prevent those solutions from achieving their optimal ROI, effectiveness or their value over time.  Failure to identify overlaps or relationships within your supplier population can lead to missed volume discounts or rebates as well as an increase of duplicate payments by up to 300%.  Poor supplier data quality is also very costly in terms of lost efficiency and time.  Bad addresses alone can lead to miss-sent shipments and checks.  Quality supplier data is also vital to stay in compliance with various external regulations and internal controls.  Failure to achieve this compliance can be both disruptive and very costly while causing great exposure and risk.

Collection and management of supplier data is more important now than ever.  New 1099 tax legislation included in the funding provisions of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (March 2010) requires companies to collect valid Tax Identification Numbers (TINs) on a much larger scale than pre-legislation levels.  Today most companies are expected to perform 1099 reporting for less than 10% of their supplier population. When the new law takes effect, companies can expect reporting levels to rise above 90%.  Companies will need to implement new policies and potentially even new systems to manage supplier information more accurately in pursuit of staying in compliance.

The question arises: How are you going to ensure the ongoing quality of supplier information to achieve optimal project ROI and on-going efficiency while maintaining compliance with controls and regulations? 

Check back for part two.

Powered by the underlying Lavante Connect^TM platform which is hands down, the premier tool for driving communication compliance across a supplier population of any size, Lavante has unified their development team of 13souls under one game changing goal: Supplier Information Management (SIM)

This is not what you have read about anywhere else, this is not vaporware, this is not one way.  This is the soup and the nuts.  This is hard ROI…  You get both the industry leading recoveries and the supplier information together.  Pays… for… itself…

This is connection to all suppliers… for all of your departments with workflow and automation and two way communication with the click of a mouse.  This is data and docs and proactive updating based on your needs and controls.  This is much more than you have seen anywhere else but you need to hold on for a few more days…

Blast off is on May 11th in Dallas.

• Value of time spent resolving payment errors
• Customer service costs associated with payments sent to wrong location
• Costs of reissuing checks
• Time spent setting up vendors multiple times in error
• Costs of NOT using automated payment technologies
• Time is wasted trying to find and verify accuracy of vendor information.
• Inability to take early-payment discounts, confirm contract terms are being adhered to, or to ensure that employees work with preferred vendors
• B-Notice Fines Most companies evaluate data quality projects because they qualitatively know these things are hurting them.

Demonstrating the cost of a poorly maintained vendor file will quickly get management attention and support.  I would also offer one other idea that we left out of the webinar because we did not want to make the event a sales pitch.  Our own solution (at Lavante) couples vendor file management and Profit Recovery so that you can drive a hard ROI in addition to many different softer ROI’s outlined above.

In any event, Vendor Files are a universal pain point for most large enterprises and if you are trying to get momentum behind a cleansing project, I strongly encourage tying the project back to dollar saving potential.  You can view the website here:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/393061873 and you can download a white paper here: http://resources.lavante.com/GoogleLeverageVFMaxProfitsWP.html?gclid=COal4ODgmKACFRknawodqz3gnA

The information and the story were great, but I am no graphic designer and the powerpoint graphics left a little to be deisred.  Not wanting the presentation to be too dry, I added a few images of the Holland America Lines cruise ships.  These are very impressive and majestic vessles, and the images were very striking.  Ellen and I hunched over my computer for a last review before our case study and she saw the photos for the first time.  Out loud, she said almost wistfully, “what a pretty ship” and then she took another moment and spoke again, “it really is gorgeous.” 

Ellen has worked for HAL for 26 years, she has been on her share of cruises and she has seen the entire fleet in photos and in person more times than she can remember, but after all of this, she is still moved to the point of calling her ships “gorgeous” when presented with their image.  I hope everyone reading this blog can feel as proud of their company as Ellen feels for hers. 

Everyone of us deserves to be as impressed with the product that their company produces.  I understand that we are not all in the cruise line industry and falling in love with our product may not be as easy for us, but we should always seek to find some part of our work that makes us proud.  In my own situation, I work for a company that performs profit recovery and optimizes vendor data for Fortune 10o0 companies.  It is not always the most glamorous work, but it is wonderful work when I see how much we deliver to our clients and how they feel about working with us.  

At the end of  the case study Ellen produced a stack of business cards and held them up in front of about 50 people.  She offered to hand out a card and have a conversation with anyone in the room that was planning a recovery audit in the next year.  As she put it, She “loved working with Lavante.”  In all her 26 years she said that she had never  enjoyed working with recovery auditors until engaging with us.  I guess her comments are something that I can be proud of.