INTERCOMPANY INVOICING

Challenge: At one of my past employment there was a challenge to enter and account Intercompany  Invoices as the company in recent past acquired several companies and all those companies were using  different ERP (Software) for their transaction processing and accounting. The parent company was using  another ERP and all those acquired companies had to manually send their transactional details to the  parent. It was a great challenge in terms of communication and for Accountants to manually key in  thousands of invoices every month and send those details to parent company, most of the times  accuracy was compromised due to heavy volume of the invoice, to eliminate inaccuracies there was an  additional layer of checks to be performed by the manager which made this process time consuming  and not meeting quality benchmark and creating a lot of communication issues which led to frustration  and arguments among teams.

Selection: When I was given the assignment I wanted understand the whole flow to map it out similar to  what was discussed in one of the topics of Week 1 called “Visualization” as I felt that the process is not  streamlined, poor communication and no existing design is causing this issue Visualization was the right  tool in my opinion.

Application: I conducted several sessions and invited subject matter experts and the accountants to  understand how it is done today, what are the common pain areas faced by the accountants, regardless  of the software identify common steps they take to enter invoices in system and invent a tool that can  help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. With help of visualization I was able to draw a  diagram that represented how it is done today, heard stories from different accountants from different  segments to develop customer empathy and identify if the synergy can be built so that a common  process can be adopted. It took few discussion sessions to identify everything and I was able to map out  the design that can fix this problem. Based on our several session we all came to a common ground that  we need interface that can automate the whole process so the poor communication, data inaccuracies  and other discrepancies can be eliminated. I designed a new interface that was able to automate all the  manual part and it was named Evaluated Receipt Settlement, it use to trigger invoice automatically  based on the Purchase Order receipt, the only task from accountant was to validate and approve the  transaction and it help gain efficiency and accuracy.

Insight: While working on this assignment I learned that most of the ERP do the invoicing in similar way  but they may have different way of collecting information, reporting statues and eventually reporting  the end result in form of a weekly/monthly/yearly reports, I also learned that bringing people in and  discussing a problem help resolve it quickly as more minds collectively think about the same thing and  you may get multiple ideas of resolving the main issue.

Approach: Next time when I deal with similar situation I would try to develop my own understanding of  the process in question to eliminate communication gaps and speak same language as the accountants  were speaking (in this case financial terms), create a picture of the flow so that people can see and start  giving their feedback, this basic picture of the current design can help link my understanding with  accountants and vice versa.

