In this podcast, Eric Williams, AVP of Supply Chain Management at University of Texas (UT) Health Houston, discussed how to collaborate with staff and stakeholders for mutual success. Attendees learned about his four cornerstones of a successful Procure-to-Pay (P2P) transformation and how he used change management to drive value for UT Health.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Coupa and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today’s podcast focused around The Four Cornerstones of a Successful Procure-to-Pay Transformation, where Mike Maxwell, VP, Education & Government at Coupa Software and Eric Williams, MS, CPM, AVP, Supply Chain Management & CPO at UTHealth Houston of the University of Texas will discuss how to collaborate with staff and stakeholders for mutual success.
Mike Maxwell: Hi, thank you. And good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. We got a big group online here. So really appreciate all of you joining us today. We're looking forward to a great session. I'll give a little bit of a bio on our featured speaker here in a couple of minutes, Eric Williams, we're thrilled to have him with us today, to talk about what's happening with the University of Texas, we've done the introductions, I'm going to just a quick overview of who Coupa is, we're really a SAS software company that ultimately is concerned with helping our customers increase the value of their spend. Universities and all kinds of institutions spend an enormous amount and the more value you can get from that spend, the more benefits there are to your organization. One of the things that we really try to help our customers with is making it very easy to see the spend, so that they can have some controls on the spend. And so, they can improve the spend. And that involves having a solution that is very friendly to your users, very friendly to your administrators and very friendly to your suppliers. And so, ease of use and integration and making a real transparency and efficiency is really fundamental to the Coupa platform. We're about maximizing the value of the spend and getting it done efficiently effectively. With the best optics, you can see with capabilities for benchmarking against other like organizations across your industry or whichever industry that might be Coupa has a rich array of consulting business and consulting partners for implementation of Coupa. We're identified as a procure to pay leader on 26 different industry ratings group, Gartner and Forrester being two of the more notable of those, and our leadership in that space. And again, our leadership in those spaces really come from Are you know what it first and foremost to Coupa, which is ease of use, and that's ease of use for your users, for your administrators, for your suppliers, for your IT organizations. So on at our core is our procure to pay capabilities. But we surround that with a variety of other enhancements that include inventory, supplier, Treasury contingent workforce, contract management, supply chain, and so forth. hooks are very, very much a holistic procurement management solution, all with the goal and intent of having it easy, efficient and powerful for those users. So where does Coupa fit in this world, we're not an ERP system that we integrate seamlessly with any and all ERP systems, including some, you know, Banner, for example, that's, you know, pretty uniquely tailored for the education market, as well as some of the more pervasive ERPs that you'll see on the slide. Our core is that process, it starts with the experience of the employees of your organization, going to the system, they have access to submitting a requisition, they want to buy something and there's a whole process to approve and gather that issue a APO two suppliers, process the invoice doing invoice matching some of those things that quite often can become complicated and labor intensive. The Coupa solution, very tightly integrates all of those capabilities together in conjunction with ERP, but also through our supplier portal, which is free to any supplier that wants to leverage that portal. We know there are some in this industry that charge suppliers for that capability. Our goal is to make it as accessible as possible. And so, your suppliers to that portal at no cost to them, or to all included in our platform. That's as much as I want to cover on the solution. Let me make the pleasure of introducing Eric Williams, who's our featured guest speaker today. Eric's got over 25 years of supply chain management experience. He actually started his career in the mining sector working in Alaska and Chile and Argentina. So, some pretty exotic experiences there. He then transitioned into biomedical research, healthcare, higher education, and he's been at the University of Texas for the past 17 years. He currently leads the supply chain management efforts at both UT Health Houston and the UT physicians located in Houston. Mr. Williams has led collaborative and translation efforts between research clinical and Administrative Professionals to solve complex institutional challenges with innovation determination to derive successful outcomes. Some of his accomplishments include the management of strategic sourcing events, which have resulted in over 200 million in cost savings, really impressive number. He was the visionary and creating and implementing before cornerstones of success and the value change, or value chain source to pay strategies at University of Texas. Mr. Williams has unique research and healthcare, business knowledge and experiences that span from the bench to the bedside. For those of you involved with health care. He's a graduate of UCLA holds an MS in clinical research administration, and has also served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic and in Argentina. He is a certified purchasing manager from the Institute of supply chain management. And he enjoys the outdoors lives in Houston with his wife, two children and some dogs. So, without further ado, Eric, we'll give you the floor here to talk about the great things you've been doing in Texas.
Eric Williams: Great. Thank you very much, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. It really is. I've been looking forward to this. And it's an opportunity to share with everybody on the call what we've done over the last three years, it's been a lot of hard work. But I'd love to you know, thank, of course, Coupa and Carahsoft, for providing the forum. And everybody on the call, I mean, the fact that you're joining this webinar means you have an open mind, you want to listen to different ways of doing things. And in supply chain, I think that's very important because there's many roads to manage your operation. So today, really what I'd like to provide is just UT Health's example, right, what have we done here? How did we approached leading the Supply Chain Management Department here within UT Health? And not only, you know, kind of the way to think about supply chain, but how does that correlate with a successful procure to pay transformation, a digital transformation, right, taking an organization from a lot of manual processes and moving us into a digital world. And so, a lot of my presentation today will reference, I always go back to people process and technology, and you've got to have all three of those in order to be successful. So just an overview real quick. The University of Texas in general has 14 institutions, there's eight academics and six healthcare. UT Health, Houston is one of the healthcare institutions were made up of six different schools, medical, dental, public health, nursing, bioinformatics, we have an inpatient hospital of 550 beds in behavioral health. So, we have a Behavioral Health Campus, it's the largest Behavioral Health Hospital, in the United States for an academic medical center. So, we're in that area as well. We have 2000, practicing clinicians, we have 140, clinics, around the Houston area, we have over 9000 employees, 5000 students and a budget of around $2 billion dollars. So just kind of some highlights to give you an idea of who we are. We're fairly complex. So, this complexity, right, this leads to a lot of opportunity, a lot of challenges, you know, so how do we how do we transform this very complex environment? And create a center of excellence? Right? That's, that was our goal. How do we, we take an environment that is very decentralized, people act independently, the schools, multiple systems when we first started out with this project, we were using eight different systems, you know, anywhere from a lot of paper, but people saw image now independent systems with it. So, end users. It wasn't simple, right? It was multiple places to go to get things done, very complex. A lot of manual processing, paper scanning, duplication of processes. I mean, we had literally a scanning room, right? I'll never forget that image of literally invoices stacked up to the ceiling where we were scanning stuff in full time job, a lot of that going on. We also had all of our resources focused 80% of our staffing was focused on 20% of our spent, something's not right there, right. We got a lot of a lot of people working on a lot of small dollar transactions. And, you know, how do we change that we were so busy doing all these manual and duplicate processes that there was limited customer engagement, I'll put it that way, you know, get the job done, but not out there really partnering with our customers and collaborating in, you know, supplier relationship management areas to improve how to do any of that. So, this was the environment that we were presented with a lot of just multiple systems, really making it difficult for the customer, slowing things down, and not really effectively using resources. So that was the challenge. So, with that, again, getting back to people process and technology. But you know, in order for something to be successful, you can't just have the technology piece, you just don't plug in a procure to pay system and expect it to work. I mean that failed implementations are very common, because people think that technology is going to fix everything. And if you don't have the people, and the processes built to complement that, that's probably not going to work. And so, we put a lot of time into developing what you see on the screen. value based leadership, right? Establishing a vision, something that is personal, something that you have to be passionate about. This is just our example. You know, the challenges, find your vision, right? What's your vision for your organization? Where do you want to take it? And for us, we stepped back, and we said, you know, what, what are really the attributes that we want to live up to? How do we want to live our lives? How do we want to manage the supply chain? And so, we came up with the four cornerstones of success. This establishes really, the vision for the organization, so centered around customer service, what does that mean? Right? Positive attitude, ownership of problems, highly efficient, speed, faster? Collaboration, what does that mean? You know, collaboration, people throw that word around a lot, but what does it mean? And, you know, you've got to have good communication, mutual respect for each other, right? Professions, built on trust, a totally different, different attributes and customer service. We also have compliance. I mean, with the University of Texas, we have a lot of state and federal regulations. We've got to do things the right way, we get audited a lot. And, and then finally, consistency. How do we do all these things? Consistently with a large staff, right? How do you get everybody with that vision moving towards the same direction? And so, what this does is it establishes that vision, if somebody says, you know, what do you do in your profession, every person on my staff can visualize this. And think of the four cornerstones, the four C's, and be able to tell the story, right? Customer service, collaboration, compliance and consistency. And then of course, right in the middle, is that sweet spot? And that's where we want to be. And, and so it's something fun, it's people-based, and it gets people on board, what are we about? What are we here for? Right? It's that vision. And so that's, that's a key piece of that. The people aspect, and work with your staff to come up with this. And everybody can have their own vision, right. And so, this is just an example of what we did. So, what we did was we took that vision, of course, and now we've got to, let's, let's put it into a mission statement. How do we, how do we translate that vision into our mission? And so, you know, supply chain will deliver excellence through the four cornerstones of success. And, you know, as I go through these, you can see it's a way of looking at the supply chain profession. It clicked for me; it was a number of years of kind of things cooking in my head. And this really all came together here. And so, customer service, think of it as is reducing processing times, right. That's customer service, basically faster efficiencies, procure to pay transactions, how do you go quicker, right? Collaboration is all about driving best value and supplier diversity. How do you collaborate and work with your customers and vendors to drive savings and good communication and mutual respect throughout all of our interactions? Compliance. Again, I'd mentioned you know the different regulations, but we've got to make sure that ethical procurement practices and audits procedures are part of everything we do. And then consistency, how do we deliver this message? Our processes are all consistent as we go day to day. And so really this slide think of is as your process, your mission statement, right? What are your processes centered around? And so, we took our vision, with the four cornerstones. We translated it into a mission, a simple mission statement, not pages long, a few short definitions that people can really identify with. And this is resonated with the staff. This is when you have a vision, you have a mission. Okay, now Coupa really was the tool for us to pull all that together. And we call that the value chain. So, we created a logo around that you can see it there, we have the double helix where a science-based healthcare organization, people locking arms, and so Coupa really translated in aligned with our four cornerstones. So, you know, speed and accuracy, right, reducing processing times elimination of paper, email, and mobile device approvals, ease of use, right? It's all about speed and ease of use. On the collaboration piece, it really translates in my eyes to sourcing contract management, right? How do we budget visibility? How do we increase our spend on contracts? How do we increase savings, diversity spend? And how do we go out and collaborate with customers and suppliers? So Coupa gives you that spend visibility, right? You can run analytics, reports, dashboards, metrics, and so it fit well with the collaboration, cornerstones compliance, you know, what we did was we overlaid, Coupa and kind of built right into the tool, a lot of compliance requirements through workflow routing approval rules, we embedded our procurement policy and procedures within the tool. Auditors love that right? Because then you're forced, you're consistent. So, we were able to kind of utilize Coupa, in a way so that we were we were compliant, we were fulfilling our mission around compliance. And then of course, consistency, one system, build a center of excellence, and encourage high user adoption, you know, how do we get in users, the customers, which is really what this is all about, to try and use the system. So, the last three years of work has been centered around creating that vision, the attributes people based, getting the staff on board, to build a mission statement, which establishes your processes, and then your technology piece, the Coupa overlays, and you can really support your vision and mission. For us, it was through Coupa. So, we built our metrics, why not build them around the cornerstones, right? So, customer service excellence, faster cycle times, and increased efficiency. So, we do a lot of catalog orders, we wanted to increase that, right. So pre, pre Coupa, kind of PeopleSoft pre Coupa baseline, we were doing about 40% of our orders, up to 72% of our orders, were going via catalog when we turned coupon now, we made a major effort of offering many catalogs to our end users. And that's where you want to be that's, that's the best place to be. So, we saw a big jump. And this is about eight months since implementation when these numbers around requisition approval cycle time. How fast does it take to process a wreck? Five days went down to 1.9 days. That's through ease of use and efficiencies, email approval, the Coupa app on your phone, not having to log into systems speed, right? It's all about fat speed. This is how do we get that rack out the door? How do we match invoices, right with getting invoices to match and pay instead of exceptions and piles of invoices that that don't match? First time match rate went from 22% to 76%. So that was a tremendous jump invoices coming in matching and paying. You know, a lot of times the AP department is never involved. They manage exceptions. Now. We set the system up that way percentage of electronic invoices. So, you know that we went from 30 to 67%. So, this is getting away from that paper. What's offer ways or dollars As Coupa calls him where invoices can come in, and received electronically, and of course, hopefully match and pay invoice approval cycle time, right? This is you know, getting an invoice approved by end user so it can actually pay. And previously, this was a very slow process 15 days, a lot of times we were Routing Service invoices over to end users who are signing them and scanning them and sending them back and this slow, and now 2.2 days, so we're using the technology to decrease the cycle times increase efficiencies, yep, invoices, routing, right to the end users, right? Not going to at the end user notes, and they approve it, right? An email, phone and logging in, you can see information right there. So, they don't have to log in they can. And so, this was a big one, this, of course, speeds up the entire process. And went from 15 to 2.2 days. So those are just some metrics around customer service. We monitor these all the time now and establish goals and, and work with our with our value success director Coupa to try to make progress and keep kind of raising the bar. So back to the cornerstones. This is really around cost savings. And on contract. You know, how do we collaborate early with our customers and suppliers. You know, originally Remember, I mentioned that our staff 80% of our staff are focused on 20% of our span. And so, we flipped that now. And, you know, we're really focused on automated through Coupa, a lot of those manual transactions, and we were able to promote 13 people within the within the organization and move them into the central procurement area, make, you know, move them up into contract administrators, buyer tools, contract managers, get them on the offensive, right? Looking for opportunities. And, you know, now 80% of the staff is we're really focused on where the spend is, you know, focus on 80% of the span. And that has been very successful, we made this whole transition, we did not lay off anybody. And I didn't hire a bunch of people, right, it was really through the use of our own resources and through Coupa. To, to automate and make the digital transformation. And now really starting to focus on collaboration. We've done very well on the customer service side, we saw the metrics, and now we're really starting to build out collaboration. And so, a couple things here, we've increased, like our catalog vendors, which I mentioned earlier, and the number of catalog orders we went to from 12 to 40 vendors, your E procurement strategy should align with your sourcing strategy. That's really important. So, you know, being able to give end users visibility to, you know, the best pricing or preferred suppliers, giving them visibility to diversity suppliers. You know, we want to try to end users to our contracted vendors, of course, and to help vendors, our percentage of on cat contracts spend is increasing, right, we were pre Coupa, we were up 37%, we're now at 55%. And the goal is I really want to get up to 70% of what we buy as is on a contract. That's where we're moving. That's where we need to go. value creation. This This was last fiscal year. Our goal is 3 million, we created six and a half million dollars in document value creation. And we're really trying to increase our business reviews with customers and suppliers. And so, getting out there and collaborating, right, that's the key you gotta you got to be seen as a business partner, sitting around the table with the different departments and collaborate. So, you know, as I wrap up here, we've really gone over kind of how we established a vision and mission statement, and then laid Coupa on top of it to really drive these results. And the metrics that we just went over. You know, it's the four cornerstones of success. That's what we use here. We, we promote value chain, and, you know, three, three kind of critical success factors that you take with you. You know, how do you know, establish a vision, Scott be something you believe in, something you're passionate about. And then take that leap, right, you have to have a lot of courage or a lot of times, people look to me like, you know, what am I talking about? What am I gonna, what am I doing here, you have to believe in it? And you have to have that courage to, to drive forward and just believe in it, and have no fear. And that's not easy a lot of times, and you've got to have your team with you. You've got to have everybody on board. You cannot do this alone. Everybody has to be motivated. Everybody has to believe in the vision. And then determination. I mean, this is good old fashioned hard work, and got to put in the hard work. It's not easy, and to make to make a Procure-to-Pay transformation. But if you put in the hard workday in and day out, you'll get there. And so, these are just three, three things that I've kept in mind along the way, and I thought I'd share them with you. So, with that sort of thing. Thank you everybody for joining and listening to our story here at UT Health.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or Coupa can assist your agency or educational institution, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email Harjeet.Khalsa@Carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day!