As we prepare to automate your systems, we don’t simply reproduce existing processes if they aren’t as efficient as possible, and we don’t ask customers to come up with all kinds of parameters out of thin air. Instead we come to you with a well-organized workbook that helps you quickly download your knowledge to us in the form of business rules that will control how your AcceLIM automated system will behave.
In a compact timeframe, we meet face to face with all employees who will participate in the new system to glean their knowledge, identify and address their most difficult order management issues, and share our ideas.
The workbook approach is highly effective because over time we’ve learned which questions help customers move through the decisions on business rules as quickly and skillfully as possible. We expose the rules that already exist in your process by revealing the decision making that goes on - either consciously or by default. One question might be, “Where should pricing discrepancies get routed?” Typically they go to the buyer for resolution. Or, “If your chosen ‘nag period’ is five days, what happens at the end of five days if there’s been no response? In your current system are they considered ‘approved’ and paid?”
As we go through the workbook with you, we offer suggestions based on what we’ve seen other customers in your industry use to achieve the kind of metrics you’d like. We then customize those best practices to work ideally with your systems. Our customers find this makes the planning process low-stress and time-efficient, and the end result is a cloud service tightly aligned with your goals and set to deliver savings and increased efficiencies right away.
There are numerous time-consuming logistical details that have to be taken care of in order to automate the supply side order management process, and when you choose to automate with AcceLIM, we take care of all those details for you. This includes setting up P.O. boxes, getting hardware up and running, setting up websites, hard copy retention, all aspects of the infrastructure.
AcceLIM customers benefit from our depth of experience as we plan and execute every aspect of converting your supply side order management to our automated system. We provide deep, thorough, and efficient planning as well as nimble response throughout the process to get customers up and running within the aggressive timeframe we set as our goal.
Because we have done this so many times, we are aware at the outset of what needs to happen in order to deliver such a timeline. We have a proven, established methodology that allows each new customer to benefit from every other onboarding experience we’ve had and from our knowledge of customers in your industry.
Instead of starting with a blank slate and a lot of discussion, we come to you with a task and issue tracker partially prepopulated with a starter set of tasks we believe will apply based on what we know about your company and industry. We’ll go over it together, ask you questions, and customize it to fit your situation, but we’ve found that our approach saves an enormous amount of time for our customers and gets us into production swiftly.
Our project management services include:
Integrating two systems can be a daunting task, but AcceLIM provides your IT team with a significant set of both baseline and detailed queries and scripts which form the foundation of the interface and dramatically speed up the integration process. Your IT team’s responsibility is limited to bringing over customizations you’ve made to your financial applications.
We’ve carefully designed the organization and timing of our customer training for maximum effectiveness. The training is tailored to each customer’s specific system and their own parameterized business rules. It is also customized by role for the different groups of employees who will use the system: accounts payable, receiving, purchasing and planning, and other approvers.
We’ve found from our experience that the timing of the training is critical to its success. Accounts payable staff get an early round of training during implementation so they can use the system during the testing phase. All users get a thorough training as close as possible to the date when the system goes live so it will be fresh in their memory but not so fresh that they haven’t had a chance to absorb it.
A critical aspect of the training we provide is the follow-up we offer a few weeks after the system is up and running. We host refresher training sessions either onsite or by webinar and help employees resolve actual scenarios from their issue queues. This helps firm up every employee’s understanding of the system and gives them any extra support they need.
This stage of the onboarding process is a crucial part of how we deliver the results our customers enjoy. After a customer’s first quarter with AcceLIM, we meet to formally review their performance, make recommendations based on what we’ve seen, and adjust any tolerances that need to be changed in order to get the system even more tightly tailored to their goals.
After that, instead of just leaving the customer to their experience in the cloud, AcceLIM continues to meet with them on a regular basis to review results and identify goals to work on each time. We discuss information we’ve jointly agreed to track such as which type of discrepancies occur most often; which buyers and suppliers had the highest discrepancy rates; and which suppliers were slow to implement negotiated price changes. These are just a few examples of data we may track; each customer’s reporting will differ based on the specific issues that they want to address.
It’s common for a customer to choose to work on an issue that we’ve addressed in the past with other companies, so we’re often able to suggest proven solutions based on our experience. Our experience also helps when it comes to identifying goals for improvement. These ongoing reviews and goal-setting are an integral part of how our customers end up with single-digit discrepancy rates and tripled A/P productivity.