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Invoice notes example for Facilities

the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode good morning and good afternoon to everyone from coast to coast welcome to today's webinar facilities and service services in voice workflow project at the University of Toronto my name is David Elliott and I'm the professional development coordinator at cabo I'll be hosting today's webinar the webinar is being delivered by to cabo members from the University of Toronto Ron swale chief operating officer operations officer property services and sustainability and Darryl Fernando Polly director financial services facilities and services before we start just want to orient everyone to the screen the red box with the white arrow inside it will expand or collapse your control panel inside the control panel you will see a question pane to use we encourage you to submit questions throughout using the GoToWebinar controls the presenters will attempt to address all questions during the webinar the webinar is being recorded and will be made available on the cobo website now i'd like to welcome our presenters Ron and Darryl thank you very much David Jeremiah are extremely pleased to be able to share our experience and improving our accounts payable operation we're hoping to have lots of time to respond to questions as we go through the webinar so please feel free to send in your questions so by way of feedback or sorry introduction the st. George campus is an extremely large complex and research intensive campus my department provides operational services to the campus community on a daily basis as well as long term stewardship of the physical assets over time by daily population the st. George campus alone would rank as one of the largest 75th largest cities in Canada the facilities and services budget is significant and net dollars it's close to 120 million dollars annually and it's split into three distinct areas our district energy system and utilities procurement portion deferred maintenance and our campus operations and services now having accessible timely and accurate financial information is critical to efficient effective in transparent organization a decade ago our financial information could not be described as accurate timely or accessible paper ruled with a budget of over a hundred million dollars annually it was difficult to know where we stood at any given time in relation to our budget or where our money was being spent we needed to change we were in a climate of financial constraint which we are still in we needed to accomplish much more with less resources as the university grew our accounts payable like many other processes and facilities and services at time were completely paper driven staff were busy working but they weren't effective we were routinely duplicating effort across a very large number of people and we didn't know where payments were in relation to contractors our contractors are in suppliers are being frustrated with our black of timely payment and being able to tell them where we were and our staff were not being accountable we needed staff to undertake value-added work and create a system that facilitated accountability speed and provided upper management with key accurate financial information historically it was very difficult for staff to provide information for us in our old system and when we did get the information it took an absorbent amount of time so it was it was really a challenging thing just to get high level information let alone trying to get into some of the more granular information that I required facilities and services departments in general live and die based on the commitment of third-party suppliers and contractors there really a fundamental part of what we do we expect them to jump through hoops meet unreasonable timelines provide us with great value for money and attend situations that you know happen after hours and on weekends a critical part of this business relationship is paying contractors and suppliers on a timely basis and additionally we want to take advantage of any discounts we could get or avoid penalties so before I pass it over to Darrell there any questions any questions okay we owe the yes oh sorry thanks for cutting up yeah exactly technology Leah and our slides are moving fabulous for seven years sorry about that right good I just as well back so now that's okay from pass it over the terminal thank you Ron as Ron mentioned it was quite clear that we needed to revamp our accounts payable processes so in 2012 after consulting various stakeholders and subject matter experts we developed a very comprehensive business specification document as you know we are governed by the broader public sector procurement rules and so in 20 30 in January we floated a public tender on works in april 2013 after a thorough evaluation we compiled a short list of potential proponents we invited the mode to Toronto for interviews and we had to see it detailed clarification on their RFP responses our evaluation team comprised of subject matter experts and he contacts from a client departments we wanted to make sure that we brought in our client department context as well so that you know in the long run you know they are part of this solution in October 2013 after a very series of a long series of discussions we finalized the statement of work with the successful wenda there after we did our obvious reference checks and the contract was awarded to the success success would be there and in this case it was a dolphin enterprise solutions in December 2013 we conducted a four-day comprehensive fact-finding workshop in Toronto and we were pleased to see dolphins a team if you will you know come down to Toronto and spend the four days with us getting all the details of how we operate the university culture the compliance requirements and you know what kind of solution they were working towards in August 2014 we are pleased to inform you that we went live and it's been over two years now since we roll the system out and it's working very very well I should say the next tues / fully addressed how we evaluated the software and also how we evaluated prospecting vendors on the software side we wanted to make sure that the software solution aligned perfectly with the university's ASAP enterprise system therefore seamless integration with SI p along with the web applause for mandatory requirements the solution had to be scalable and support multiple invoice approval scenarios for example we have non pio invoices vo invoices and utility invoices and each of these types of invoices has their own no answers with respect to how we process them in the system the system had to be user-friendly and sustainable for us to manage administer upgrades and support the system in the long run it had to be unfavorable by us so we did not want to have to go to the vendor each time there was a change if someone was to join or leave your department for example or if we wanted to make changes to the approval tables or the thresholds we did not have to resort to going back to the window to make those changes we wanted the control within ourselves so that we could manage that process and obviously reduce costs as well really signed data and documentation from sa p was paramount to us we wanted to make sure that there was instant validation within SI p so if someone was to enter for example a percent a number that would be a real time validation of that information we wanted to seamlessly toggle between say p and the applications so if you were in application and you wanted to check for example a purchase order to go into the purchase order right away and not even realize that you are you are left the application and that you are in SCP so we did achieve that through this solution the application had to be innovative yet flexible in order to accommodate our unique business process so basically you know we had our own business processes and we want to make sure that there was flexibility in the system that would accommodate these processes in terms of when the evaluation one could easily argue that this evaluation is absolutely critical to the successful implementation of any system they had to have in-depth experience both in terms of integration and alignment the window had to demonstrate that they were receptive to certain amount of customization to meet our unique codes and of course we wanted a vendor who had proven track record in this field so we were looking for a vendor who was very professional in their approach and who could answer our specific questions you can appreciate with the detail mister spex we had we have a lots of questions that we needed answer we appreciate that the windows frankness in terms of what their solution could offer whether we our extremely detailed business fix and we also liked the fact that they were not afraid to recommend alternate best practices based on their experiences in the past so that was that was very good because most often you know we all think that you know what we're doing is the best way to do it but when you get a third party in consultant or windows have this experience they made a feedback and also at times make us rethink our processes you know and and certainly we benefited from their experience in this regard solid references was obviously a crucial requirement and and they found out very well finally we recognized and appreciated the windows collaborative approach and mutual desire to develop a successful solution so this was very able the time we the water the contract it was quite evident that they wanted to work with us they were equally invested in the project success and they too wanted to use this project maybe as as the shining example for them down the road so it was mutually beneficial to both of us before I move on are there any questions though see anything here right nothing on the chatline no okay so we'll move on we move on to some information on facilities and services itself basically the department has three distinct AP invoice processing modules within the overall structure so as you can see there the building operations and maintenance services which primarily have very large number of invoices small value for the most part and it can have a combination of p 0 and 0 on pio invoices then we have a utilities which again has high volume of invoices they all non p 0 invoices of course but a small number of windows so hydro water gas team and so on and they are extremely time sensitive because you know they had to be paid promptly if not it will attract late payment charges and then we have trades which is another distinct category of invoices which has a combination of what we call pio invoices and non pio invoices because the trades is responsible for the inventory system we conduct those invoices through a three-way invoice process and they are very small value hi I volume invoices generally speaking given the size scope age and divers use of our buildings the facilities and services department is extremely busy and a dynamic unit as such do our share of reactive emergency work that requires immediate action for example we may have to deal with critical issues such as a flood so we deal with the flat first and then give you the paperwork subsequently therefore any new system introduced would have to satisfy competing priorities ie the flexibility to accommodate the realistic business operation as well as to ensure that interval controls are not compromised so that was very important worse at a minimum all invoices require a recommender and at least one approval so the new system had to complement the numerous sub business units we have approximately 30 sub business units each with its own independent operating style and they would have their differing rules approvers approval levels and so on for example utilities would have a different approval threshold compared to a non utilities invoice so the same individual who signs the utilities invoice will sign for a higher value and if you signing for an operating budget in boys it will be for a lower value so it was not straight forward obviously but these were our business requirements and we were striving to have them satisfied some information on the accounts payable dept specifically we have the equivalent of free AP processes processing stuff and there are approximately 120 approvers across the facilities and services department who I in some way shape or form involved with the inversion forward process so they could be recommended they put forward invoices or they put approve invoices we process over 25,000 invoices per year actually now that we have a very accurate count you know we can say it's closer to 30,000 now we are bordering on 30,000 in noises the year and as you can see a majority of these invoices are non pio invoices about eighty percent are non pio invoices we do have a large volume of monthly ility invoices and this these are basically for hydro gas water tea spanning over 120 buildings prior to the introduction of the new system we did not crack the consumption data in SCP but instead staff were manually updating Excel spreadsheet for each utility type against each meter number but more on this later that infused a lot of error to oh yes absolutely because you can imagine entering you know all these consumption data meter reading and so on manually on the spreadsheets and say yo you see you know dangerous for you mirrors and so on but I'll speak to that a little bit data what do you see here is a very highly simplistic overview of the invoice workflow process so essentially what happens here is invoices come into a central hub in accounts payable it could come in by mail fax or email and then the AP staff would scan the invoices and when I did the invoices now the beauty of the invoices that come in we are email is that staff did not have to scan the invoice because the advanced technology be used would sort of pretty much absorb this invoice attachment from the email and do the scanning automatically so that save this one of time once the invoice is validated its center across by the AP stuff on its merry way into the workflow and basically it would go to a recommender or directly to an approver in the case of utility invoices it would go direct to an approver and so the AP staff would not have to start the workflow it would work flow would start directly from the validation stage after scanning once the recommender approves it it basically gets posted in a CP if all the criteria has been met the predetermined criteria has been met it will get posted in stp directly without having to come back to the accounts payable staff to do that function so it's highly streamlined and of course you can get more complicated if there are exceptions and so on you see here in this fatality is a very simplistic wheel which works which functions ninety percent of the time on the invoices we process in terms of configuration of the business rules we we had three choices for the routing of invoices basically we could bypass AP and route the invoice directly to the recommender so we do this in the case of utilities invoices by using what is known as they pay within range utter out feature what this does is we have a table in the background that has the utility type of utility the meter number and based on that it identifies who should get that invoice for a community so the moment the AP stuff scan the invoice the invoice goes directly to that recommender without having to without the AP star having to start that workflow order once again so that's a huge fee expedites the payment of e3 T's and you know you're happy to note that we have not attracted any late payment charges since we implemented the system then the second option in terms of routing an invoice and that is known as the No Touch posting essentially what that does is it sends an invoice if it's a p.o invoice it could go potentially directly to sa p for processing we at U of T and that facilities and services did not use this option because for internal control purposes we wanted to make sure that the people who were involved with that purchase order and in boys were touching that invoice to recommend and approve if everything was delivered also is as expected so we we bypass that option of a no-touch posting the third option and which is what we use most of the time except for utility invoices is the routing of invoices to AP staff who will look at the invoice and then determine which department the invoice belongs to and then they would send it across for approval once the department is identified system would know exactly who should get the invoice and who should approve the invoice from that point on depending on the invoices dollar amount so there's no bypassing any any rules or anything like that because the moment i recommend clicked on recommend the system would automatically go to the next level to the approval and the moment that a prover clicked on a probe depending on the dollar amount of the invoice the system would escalate the invoice or escalate to the next level and so on till the final level is reached once it's satisfied it would post to ASAP directly like I said without going back to AP star so the a piece of involvement was minimized there was more time for the recommend and the approval to look at the invoice and to make sure that what they were paying was was valid accurate and legit next we will discuss in more detail about the benefits of the system I want to emphasize that the value of the system goes way beyond scanning and simply moving an invoice from person a to b we adopted advanced OCR which is basically optical character recognition software capabilities that essentially auto-populated over ninety percent of the required fields so we have the screen with the fields that are required for the invoice to move along and get processed in SA p and was this optical character recognition software days during the scanning stage was to capture to identify from the invoice where these fields were and then populate those fields with the data from the invoice it's quite cool and amazing when you when you look at how it operates and you know it's almost hundred percent I've said ninety percent here to be conservative but it's almost hundred percent that we you know that captures from the scanning process so as you can imagine you know the staff time eliminating mundane manual data entry work is totally eliminated not to mention you know the key punch errors that could come with that the system another main benefit of the system is helping with audit requests we have large batches of invoices copies that can be retrieved within seconds so very often will get the auditors you know all the ministries or occurs on frp invoices requesting copies of invoices and usually these might span like a full year's invoices for a particular vendor for example we can retrieve this on the system within seconds and zip the file and this new mini 2 to the auditors whereas in the past stuff would go to the archives spend countless hours you know looking for these invoices going through filing cabinets and then eventually responding to the request similarly at the end when it comes to accrual valuation I mean it's it's a breeze I've gone through I think to urine cycles with the system and it it's been a breeze for us to identify exactly where we are in terms of Krul's because you can within seconds identify the total value of invoices out there in circulation in the system at a different time so even on the day we close the books in the morning I know what our overseas and at the time of closing I know what the cool valuation is in the past that was a really difficult process absolutely I mean just to give you some context in the past staff would lock these invoices towards your end and essentially when the invoice is sent out their luggage on a spreadsheet when it comes back there take it off the spreadsheet and that's how we arrived at our valuation you know it sounds simple but you can appreciate when you're dealing with over 25,000 invoices a year you know you start this exercise around March because I your end is April and it's such a tedious job it's it has very little value to the process and it diverse staff time from actually processing the invoices which is there you know cofunction and primary you know responsibility more key benefits I mean there is complete transparency in the system the our customers can see exactly how much they were charged they can view the invoice copy and they're all happy because they can see there is no markups the invoice is visible to them and that's what they've been charged as well so it's seamless it's extremely transparent in terms of accountability there is email notifications that the approvals receive if you get an invoice today at 11pm in the night you get an email stating that you have invoices purple and then we built in some controls with respect to reminders so there are reminders if its operating in voice every five days business days you get a reminder if you haven't dealt with it and if it's a utility invoice every three days because of the urgency in more that we reminder that you have to deal with this invoice and we've also built in escalations were required there is a detail or if history I mean now there is no denying when an invoice was received by a staff person in the past you know invoices don't get paid a window would call and and you know I'm not picking on property managers here but just as an example yes your service I time but they would come and they would you know put the blame on the accounting staff saying that you know they have been sitting on an invoice and I'm not processing the payment because these were not loved it was very hard to prove exactly when it was a prod and who was to blame and so on the system now you know is very clear it has a detail or its history to the second as to when you got it when you held on to it when you are pro deed and when it went to the next stage and so on so it's very seamless and and the staff are extremely happy because it protects them now from from these kind of allegations friend I think they there's much more collegiality and far fewer complaints about your department now I mean it is don't happen anymore exactly I mean you know earlier the compares of a huge and now it's a lot less than hardly anything because you know it's working system is working simply put and also it has the increased accountability basically results in faster payment cycles and it has improved our window relations with with our vendors I mean they are happy they are getting paid on time as they should and and we are we are happy because we have less cause because it's only when they don't get paid at the call so now stop are feeling less calls and they're doing more value-added forensic work as opposed to you know fielding calls or looking at filing cabinets and so on improving internal controls and releasing risk were key elements of the project so the system actually can has an advanced method of identifying potential duplicates so you can identify a duplicate either within the system or a duplicate that exists in SC AP and it'll direct us to that record so that we can verify and see whether in fact it is a duplicate or it's just the invoice the vendor has used the same invoice number for example or again we have established approval levels which cannot be bypassed so these are set in stone only a system administrator with the approval of you know senior management can contain these levels approval levels a manager would have a certain limit a director would have a certain limit and so on and these approach tables are controlled for each business unit so these missus unit will have their own approval levels in terms of delegation of authority and assigning substitutes we have also built in some controls there so that you know when I'm going on vacation for example you know if I'm going for multiple weeks I can assign you know I'm finance manager a week one and my IT manager for week two and also the control is that itís cannot assign anyone within my department but only certain people at certain levels within the department so that brings in another layer of internal controls which we wouldn't have in the past I mean some of these features was so good in my view anyway that they were subsequently adopted by the vendor as part of their standard platform now I recall when we were discussing the statement of work with the vendors they were saying you know why do you want these sort of rules because they were not familiar with these issues and now they have sort of you know they've bought in big time and I'm they have used it as part of their standard platform that's good for good reason for us so another another key benefit of the system relates to sustainability we've realized significant paper savings both on the originals that you to be sent in but also on photocopying and we've also through this had the opportunity to eliminate a significant amount of filing cabinets that used to take up space so we're not we're not we're no longer housing literally tons of paper on our floor we're using our floor for for office space and more productive use the other benefit sustainable benefit of the system is it it's facilitated expansion of our work from home program in the past one of the you know when we talked about expanding the system one of the concerns was the fact that staff you know would have to take paper copies home and they might lose it so that's been eliminated that fear of it because it's all electronic we have no fear of that the systems tracking ability ensures that you know we know what a reasonable day's work is and so we can monitor that and the staff know we can monitor that when they're working from home so there's no misunderstanding between staff working from home it's been extremely well received by staff and staff morale you know every staff member who could take advantage of working from home is taking advantage of it and so staff morale has definitely improved as a result with the system so that's true i mean the accounts department right now is be envy of the rest of the facilities and services departments because not only because of their efficiency but because of the fact that they can work from home which is you know obviously a key benefit to staff as well this in terms of reports the solution comes with some really cool great canned reports i mean we have you can identify the status of an invoice at any given time there is a info center which which shows you the inflight invoices where ideas with homies and so on and like i mentioned previously i mean the fact that stuff can you know identify where and invoices and also the approvers can identify where an invoice is you know there's less interaction in terms of you know coming with queries but in that proves can right away deal with the window query and until let them know you know you got paid on such a day you chance to check on such a day or you know main voices with my boss right now I will follow up and so on so games sorry we see a question about sorry to interrupt era but change management we will be addressing change management issues later in the presentation very soon pictures in fact some of our vocal opponents to change you know drop by the office and you know after a few months of implementation you know said that how happy they were with the systems to me that was quite gratifying because they were quite work out during the training session stage probably because there was no accountability and transparency but I think you know that quickly was overshadowed with the benefits the system brought him so that was good to hear from them you know as to how the system was working and end up they liked it we also develop some key customized reports to meet with our specific needs so what you see here is a dashboard that gives you a very comprehensive real-time overview of the state of the AP world if you will just to go over that quickly you know the top left quadrant is all the invoices in flight right now so it's more on your screen probably there is about 100 voices with AP stuff right now that needs to go out in the workflow the big orange bar you see there is the number of invoices at that moment that were in circulation with various recommenders and approvers so that's a very good snapshot of how many invoices are out there and for me how many invoices are with the AP stuff that's the yellow box there the first one and that's useful information obviously on the top right quadrant you see two bars there the yellow and the blue I believe the yellow signifies this is for the last three weeks so it's the three-week data and shows you the invoices that came we are email which is the yellow bar and once they came through the regular you know snail mail and that's the blue bar as you can see the yellow bar is you know sometimes dropping the blue bar there so this is an interesting trend because when we started the system before we start in the system we used to have about twenty percent of invoices coming to a dedicated ap email address now what we are finding is about sixty to sixty-five percent coming we are email and the balance 35 to 40 peace through regular mail that says that saves a lot of time because like I mentioned before the ones that come we are email do not have to be manually scan so that's that's a great saving and it helps the windows too because they have an electronic record that they email that invoice as opposed to just sending out an invoice the bottom left quadrant is basically a sort of a life to date if you will from the time we started the project in August rolled it out these are the this is a historical information relating to how many invoices we process the huge gray bar there is how many inversions have been cashed since we started over 53,000 yes exactly so that's so over 53,000 in two years so so and then the bottom right is again over the last one year period a quick pie chart of exactly how many invoices the yellow ones to receive via email and the green ones are the ones that came to regular mail if you do the math you see it's about 60 to a percent or so the utility consumption report this one you see here is a customized report it basically leverages the Koufax optical character recognition technology the OCR technology i mentioned to capture the statistical data that is there in an invoice so there is the meter readings the reading days from to meet the numbers consumption and so on that is captured and it automatically populates this report it helps us with our upp is forecasting again as I mentioned previously in the past staff used to manually introduce and spreadsheet so you can appreciate the tremendous time and effort saved as a result great opposite order on thank you Joe so here's an example of some of the queries that we can do with the system and in this particular one we're looking at a specific company and how that company is being used across users of the system so that's effective and seeing you know how how many you know how important the vendor is to our operation so we can we can look at different companies see which ones aren't being used and called Cola ones that aren't being used and and bring in new contractors to ensure that we're getting a you know competitive bids the other positive thing is the inverse we could look at Joe Smith specifically and see how he's spending and and see you know is is that spend too focused on one or two contractors so it's it's really a very powerful system from an oversight point of view so this this system is is really because of the exposure something like today our award is really being considered more broadly I mean it's funny it's picking up steam now that we actually have got some outside recognition that facilities and services isn't usually the department that sets a new standard for the University and far as a finance but this is certainly one of those and it's certainly looking like it will be utilized across a far broader spectrum of the university this solution is highly transferable to other other departments or campuses and it's you know as we indicated it's extremely powerful software it's eliminating a lot of busy work data entry phone calls photocopying day stamping and filing I mean the day step is one that drugs you describe me absolutely crazy but that's not value-added work it provides the opportunity for detailed data mining and easily provides high-level information right down from the top down to the individual level so what's not to like about the system you know improved speed improved accuracy throughput ensuring compliance with signing limits real-time information and ensures that that the staff are accountable you know i can give you one example there was an individual who was eventually I got a complaint from a contractor and when we looked into an individual's was looking or holding on to close to a million dollars of invoices because you know he was not happy with the contractor and how he was dealing with that was just sitting on the invoice and that's really not how I want my staff to interact with with suppliers and contractors if you have an issue deal with it but you don't have you passive-aggressively sit on an invoice for an extended period of time I think of as months now staff are accountable people who are providing you know tendering and awarding work and overseeing work do you have to pay the contractors on a reasonable time frame and if there's an issue deal with them yes and I mean in that scenario you'll explain wrong in the past the blame would have come on to the accounts payable finance habit for not paying it on tonight so a way and going back to key success factors and lessons learned it seems and sounds simplistic but this was not by far not an easy project it had unprecedented detail business specification that had to be written and you know we had many U of T stakeholders and partners involved so we had internal audit center financial services center procurement services and the IT unit and and each of these you know partners and stakeholders had you know their own reservations at times and challenges keep in mind this is this was cutting edge to the University at the time or still is and and you know some of us like the same ol same ol and this certainly wasn't the case I think I think one thing that I've mentioned there is particularly I think you know to blame ones group but I T continually tried to get us to compromise on what we wanted and I would emphasize the people don't compromise they wanted to phase in the solution you know if you phase in a solution sometimes you never get to actually what you wanted so we were extremely uncommon mean what we wanted we stuck by it even though repeatedly people tried to pull us back and that's definitely something I would emphasize to people don't compromise as far as change management that's what people have talked about we're talking about you know more than 120 people who had control over different invoices and that that was a challenge getting people's buy-in certainly you know people felt like big brother was watching them and you know when they're losing control but but discussions and through time and through practice and actual the actual execution people did some of the most you know vehement critics actually understood that this was going to save them time and actually improve their their jobs so true and I mean if I might add to that besides the hundred and twenty year Brewers I mean internally within the accounts payable stuff you know that was a huge challenge as well and this is no exaggeration but collectively the three to four staff who handle accounts payable duties you know had over a hundred years of collective experience processing invoices in a same old fashioned way so so you can appreciate the the hurdle and the challenge that you know we were faced with two to give them on board and you know one of the things we did and then you have a question here I really want to change management one of the things we did was to make sure that the AP staff were in more right from the beginning made them partners part of the solution as opposed to the problem and get their environment and buying definitely once they started to realize the advantages of the system you know you could see the the the momentum shift you know in terms of the buy-in and it certainly made my change management process a lot easier and again as as Ron mentioned in you got to be open and flexible with what you need but at the same time do not compromise on your main goals other other lessons learned you know set up regular milestones of course you you want to make sure that you are on track have a good project management team engage your stakeholders include the subject matter experts and three plants in requirements gathering so you make sure that you have the right people in the room when you are doing your requirements gathering phase you communicate and inform the team you know keep constant communication lines open inform them as to where things are going and so that they know that it is progressing it's not the project is not dead in the water provide training early you know we made sure we provided training early to stop gave them documentation as well and we did not walk away after women life you know we made sure we walk the halls will be interacted with the approvers and we ensure that you know they were they were we were there to answer their specific questions you know we highlight the fact that they will be transforming themselves into knowledge workers engage in value-added work be more meaningful tasks so that was very important as well so let's face it the finance departments don't get a lot of positive profile and often quite the reverse this team you know once convinced the solution was going to improve their operations worked extremely hard to make this successful and the group is extremely proud of the being recognized through Kabul and that a couple plaque sits in our lobby and and that's our staff walk by it every day as to our visitors to our floor and speaking of celebrating successes with stuff you know we have proudly mounted this infographic on a wall where the AP staff operate it is a great tool it gives you a very quick snapshot of about the project you know the savings of any invoices we process the OCR technology and it's a good project recap and it's also not a not a very subtly enforcement of the significant benefits of the project it cultivates a shared sense of pride in our collective success I will now pass it on to run again to speak about defense before I pass it on the run sorry there is a question here and that is the system connects to a work order system for visiting operations maintenance and services so you can reference the work order and know which AP vendor did the work is that what SCP is so sorry I should have probably at the onset explain what SI p is that our enterprise software it's one of the largest software enterprise software systems in the world it's a German product its I believe it stands for systems applications and processes and I believe u of t is the only University in terms of use and SCP but there are lots of organizations within Canada that use this software and know the system does not this particular accounts payable voice workflow system does not integrate with the work order to determine whom the invoice should go to but we do know we have informed our vendors that they should indicate who their contact is at the university so that we can dinner out it very quickly to the correct person I hope that answers the question if not ask another so where we going so key key for us to do more with less is leveraging technology to improve product productivity and automation and this is a great example of how we've been able to harness technology to improve our productivity our ability to better manage our extremely large budget has been greatly improved by this technology rope resulting in much more consistent year-end bottom lines that Darryl indicated before and much more confidence from senior management in our ability to control our budget we have plans now underway to to roll it out to other departments at the University so with that we're happy to answer any other questions that you might have great thank you yes we've got a couple minutes left everyone there's no other questions in the queue at the moment but please feel free to send something in if you have it I think the change management piece you touched on that a tiny bit just wonder if you wanted to comment any any more on that on you know said really people did come around when they started to see the results and you're getting feedback on that and that's that's a you can ask for a better sign what were some of the things you're facing up front and beforehand aside from designing a great solution and implementing successfully how are you handling some of the naysayers as you were working towards that they're in their work oh yeah official adela being extremely determined on what we thought the long-term vision was I mean Darrell had to do a lot of work with his staff who are very experienced and you know we're very comfortable on what they're doing but when when you do talk about the potentials of the system step could see that you know this was actually going to protect them it was going to eliminate some some things they didn't like doing dealing with contractors angry calls so it originally i think it was difficult but if they came around fairly quickly when they saw the benefits of this train yeah for sure I mean obviously change management is harder during the implementation phase because you know the proof is in the pudding right so as a result of that you know what I wanted to focus on was to you know emphasize on the benefits of the the proposed system so you know we've made a lot of attention to the benefits we compared the old versus the new we brought in you know stakeholders at the requirements phase as well the you know that that was important because in the more people we got involved you know then there was the chances of you know the opposition was was much less then again at the testing phase we brought in the stakeholders from various departments do testing as well along with us so that you know the scripts were tested jointly that helped as well and then you know making sure that even there is adequate training material and training provided making sure that this is not like Ron mentioned a big brother initiative it was to who you know improve processes to do value-added work and make things efficient for everybody and once we implement it I mean with my staff I could say very clearly once we implemented you know they saw the benefits very quickly and I'm proud up I start for adapting to this and being receptive so quickly which I did not expect but it was a very pleasant and very appreciated you know response i received from them they clearly i mean nobody wants to bend into and put father invoices in finding cabinets and and you know spend their time doing that kind of work these days so they do see the benefits of this and and the other thing I would mention having a work from home program as a as a carrot at the end I don't know anybody who you know it's hard to know if anybody you know works from home a couple days a week it's a very positive experience for most people so that was also another way through the change management they saw that as a huge benefit to them and help them get on board absolutely great just to continue on that I think often people when they're hearing about an efficiency program they're worried about job cuts and you talked about how you shifted people to more value-added roles why was that communicated upfront or were you anticipating to find some staff savings to or can you just make comment on that a bit absolutely I'll take that one and that's a very good question you know that that was one of the first things we did was to make sure that stuff understood that this wasn't the job cutting a cost-cutting exercise so we had to you know make sure that they were comfortable with that and and it certainly wasn't a job cutting exercise it was really to realign what they did you know to make it more value-added and to keep in mind that you know we had this number of stuff when we were doing fifteen thousand voices and we had the same number of stuff you're doing 28,000 now so it's you know doing more with less if you will but certainly it wasn't intended as a job cutting exercise and we did spend a considerable amount of time educating the staff and and you know making sure that you know those fears which are well-founded well you know put to bed great that's a great question yeah we've got a couple other questions have come in so one is yeah can you provide the approximate cost of the system I don't know if you can share that or yeah sure that I'm afraid I couldn't go into specifics on that one I mean you know it it was a you know a few hundred thousand dollars i would say broadly speaking but what I can say it was well worth the effort and money yeah okay it's very quick roi like yeah quick yeah year and a half or two years you're ahead and already so yeah someone's asking a technical question what oh see are the optical character recognition system do you use right we used colfax software system for Koufax and you know again we were told it will it has about a seventy to eighty percent success rate and by success rate I mean it can capture various fields that need to be populated but we are quite very pleasantly surprised that it's me one was ninety two hundred percent of the capture so it it's great it's Koufax and it integrates well with the application and you know it it's quite seamless okay and there's another question here is this how do you manage Purchase card transactions okay so so the purchase card transactions are not part of this process they are just handled manually you know when we get the invoice this is strictly to deal with i would say ninety-eight percent of our invoices which are basically these invoices and the p.o and non p 0 in voices through windows the p card transactions are just handled manually same with expense reimbursements those have not been ported here at the moment okay and the just to make a plug for our next webinar I think it's October 21st McMasters actually going to be talking about a pcard system uh on their campus so it may have some information for that person who asked that question I've got another question here and they're asking again yeah what's the name of the OCR so it was a Koufax yeah kale f ok let me just write that down the chat so kof ax right there we go there we go I think let's see there any other questions no nothing else there this so you know I mean we use just once can actually so all is what with one small powerful scanner so it's not like you need let Matthew hardware or something like that to operate this mr. Fuji and a fujitsu scanner here we go is another questions come in how do you handle construction holdbacks good question that is a very good question so that is done manually at the time of validating the invoice so the whole bags where ID is identified in the invoice it's held back and then it's passed on and then once the financial accounting speaks in its charge to two different accounts one to the operating account m12 the holdbacks account at that time another question just for me it's kind of stimulate from a discussion as having yesterday with some people how does your audit department like this or integrate with this and I would find evidence they would find this pretty useful the way they the information is now managed it is really not so good but right now is very good I mean initially as there there were reservations or very scared people doing a lot of things differently in this we were moving from you know what we call 3-way POS few invites us to APO invoices which is now out of the University we were digitizing everything which was kind of never to the University we were approving you know through workflow as opposed to you know manual signature which are also now to diversity so we were doing a lot of the that were new and obviously you can expect certain amount of resistance and reservations but having said that I mean you know now when audit has a pony or personally there is total transparency and visibility so they can see exactly who a Probot why otherwise you going to try and identify a manual signature you could say it's anybody's we you know we had an example where they wanted multi-year look back and we could Daryl supplied two years of look back in five seconds you know and the rest took weeks so audit did see the advantage of not only us being able to get that information quickly but the fact that we can slice and dice it very easily true i'm so so now they're much more supportive could so another questions come in and they're saying did you have to get certified for CRA or granting agencies i guess that get approval with with CRA and granting agencies to go to go paperless or not we did not have to go get approval from them and in fact some of our editors are you know government auditors who you know administer the facilities windward program frp funds and those are ministry auditors and and we provide backup from the system whenever there's a query and that's being accepted so I mean the world is changing right you know things have moved on and and so now you know there's lots of places where you know there is digitized meticulously used and then as long as your systems are bulletproof you know we shouldn't worry about it thinking out of the box here and then you know moving forward great I don't see any other questions there so I think we can start to wrap up definitely want to say thank you very much to Ron and Darryl for today's webinar that was fantastic and great to see all the questions come in everyone thank you for the participation just promote some other upcoming cabo events you can visit our website there we've got another webinar coming up that I mentioned in October we've got our online courses started and some other things going on and there's a workshop in November on responding divestment campaigns which is big issue in our sector right now so please take a look at that and join in on the items that interest you and thanks again for your participation enjoy the rest of your day thank you thank you