Offering a 360° view of supplier information, Esker’s automated platform spans the entire procure-to-pay process — equipping finance departments with AI and RPA technology and helping them effectively manage compliance, gain full process visibility and reduce staff workload.
Esker’s Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke, talks about how Esker’s solutions can help organisations, particularly during the current economic climate.
A discussion between Esker’s Head of Marketing, Sam Townsend, and Esker’s Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke.
This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.
ST: Hi everyone, my name is Sam Townsend, and I’m Head of Marketing for Esker Northern Europe. Thanks for joining us for another Esker on Air podcast. In this session, we’ll be speaking to Esker’s recently appointed Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke, and we’ll be discussing the importance of managing credit within organisations, especially in today’s economic climate.
So, at this point I’d like to welcome Martyn, and let him introduce himself. Hi Martyn. Tell us a little about yourself and about your past experience, and how you got involved with credit management, and your current role at Esker.
MB: Hello, Sam. First of all, thanks for inviting me on here, always a pleasure! So, that’s a very good question, let’s talk about how I got into this many years ago! I actually started off initially in the procurement area, for a few years, when I left school. I fancied a change, so I went into a customer service role, back in the manual days, back in the ’80s. I probably spent two or three years in a customer service role, picking up the telephone, processing orders, taking orders, issuing credit notes, etc. So, it gave me a very good grounding for, one day, when I got a call from the credit manager at a company called Altas Cop Co, and he asked me to go and work for them as his assistant. From that day on, I’ve not looked back. I’ve spent the last 35 years, roughly, working in a credit control type environment; an order-to-cash environment. So I feel that the experience that I’ve got from that, really helped me in credit management, because now, when we talk about process improvement, we’re maybe talking about digitisation, I remember the good old manual days, so I know what it’s like, and I know how cumbersome it can be.
ST: Yes it must have been good to have that experience, to be at the coal face, and understanding all of those manual processes that were involved, and understanding, I suppose, the utopia of automating that whole process.
MB: Yes, and it’s interesting that I remember my desk used to be behind a row of filing cabinets, so I could barely see the window for filing cabinets! So, offices have changed now; I’m not sure I’ve seen a filing cabinet for a while, unless it’s got stationery in it! So, those days are gone, less mistakes are made now, there’s more validation of stuff, there’s more checks, there’s more audit, and so I can understand where it’s come from over the years, and how we’ve got there. I’ve done the journey! And here I am!
ST: Excellent, so were you involved in projects that involved automation?
MB: The answer is, not so much automation; I suppose I ought to continue the journey really. I went through a few companies, so I went from Atlas Cop Co to a German distribution company, and I then went on to work for HP. In fact I worked for a company called EDS who were taken over by HP. I then worked for a company called Rockwell Automation. So they were big American companies, very disciplined companies, very process orientated companies, and I think that this is where my process knowledge has come from, and where I became a process man. That’s moved me quite well into the digital world. I do understand the process that’s behind things, and how we can improve it. I’ve done lots of SAP and ERP implementations. I’ve been involved with lots of acquisitions, so I can understand how to integrate other companies, and subsidiaries, etc. into already existing systems and departments. So, I’ve gained a lot of experience over the years with that, and I think that’s put me in good shape for the automation world if I’m honest.
ST: And that sort of depth of knowledge for your current role at Esker; tell us a little bit about that.
MB: I ran my own business for a few years, and then I stumbled across Esker. I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t know much about Esker, in fact, I probably knew nothing about Esker when I first came across them. After discussions with the senior management there, they obviously realised, and I realised, that they didn’t have anyone in the organisation that had the operational credit management and order-to-cash experience. So, I was asked to come onboard, and I came on board as a consultant, working a few hours a month, and then a couple of days a month, and then three days a week, and now most recently I’m doing five days a week. And I’m a happy man! So that’s how I’ve ended up at Esker. So, what I do at Esker. When I first joined, it took a while to define the role, but I think now, it’s beginning to take shape. I do a lot of work with marketing, not that I’m a marketeer, but I do support them in terms of webinars, events, and getting the brand out there through my contacts and my network, the Institute of Credit Management, and other shared service forums. So, there’s lot of organisations out there that maybe Esker didn’t know about, or maybe they did know about and didn’t do anything about it, but we’re beginning to get the Esker name out there now, and I’m finding that people are coming to us rather than us pushing our name in their face, more people are now coming to us, which is proving that our marketing strategy is working.
ST: I think certainly on the side of AP, they are quite savvy on that side, in terms of knowing what’s out there for solutions, and helping them with challenges that they’ve got, but I think that it’s not always the case for accounts receivable, and credit, collections, and those sort of things. So, do you think that that’s changed over the years, and that understanding is better now?
MB: Oh most definitely, yes, Let’s go back in an operational role, maybe ten years ago, when I was doing it. I wish I’d had some of these solutions pushed in my face if I’m honest. It would have made my job, not 100% easier, but certainly 50% easier. Some of the things you think about, like visibility, auditability. I spent so much of my life with audit, and trying to produce evidence. Things like onboarding new customers; all of this type of stuff. I know that I may talk about the solutions in a bit more detail in a minute, but some of the big challenges I had were bringing on new customers, credit limit reviews, and being able to evidence that properly, and having that information in front of you, and store it. I think that is one thing that automation has given people, is a consistent process, and an auditable one, I’d say. And the visibility is absolutely brilliant in automation in my opinion.
ST: That’s excellent, and yes, we’ll come on to that a little bit later. So, thanks! A great introduction, and fascinating to understand your background, years of experience and the wealth of knowledge related to the success of managing credit. So, I touched upon it a little bit at the beginning, regarding the importance of managing credit within an organisation. We’ve heard about sometimes alarming figures, from various reports, such as those from Atradious , and you hear these figures, like 53% of total value of invoices reported are overdue, 10% of invoice values are written off, and there’s also likely to be projected increase, I think they are saying over 30%, in business insolvencies worldwide in 2022. So I guess, from your point of view, what are some of the actions an organisation can do through automating the credit management process to try and combat some of these challenges that organisations are faced with?
MB: So, before I go into the automation bit, I was actually lucky enough to listen to a few people yesterday, and I’d completely forgotten, over the last four or five years, some of the things that we’ve been through. We’ve been through some challenges and got through those challenges, and I’m sure we’ll continue to keep going through those challenges. Brexit was probably the first one. We weren’t sure of the impact of that, and we’re still not 100% sure what the impact is! And then we had the covid period come along; we had to deal with covid, and that was unprecedented. I don’t think anyone can take that away in terms of what knock on effects that has had on recruitment, retention of staff, ‘The Great Retirement’, where a lot of people who were at the end of their careers, and didn’t want to come back into it. We’ve had guys who should have already gone through university, haven’t gone through university, so they’ve now probably deferred that, and they’ve now decided to go into university, so we have a labour shortage. We have inflation that’s soaring, although, I saw yesterday that they reckon it’s come down slightly to about 9.9%. We’ve got supply chain issues, we have energy issues, we’ve got fuel prices. I sat in that room yesterday and I’d forgotten all of these things are challenges that are going to affect everyone. That’s it bluntly.
ST: Yes, it’s a perfect storm.
MB: Yes, they are the words I was probably looking for. So let’s just remind ourselves that we’ve got these challenges. Fraud is probably another one, and there are a lot of fraudulent claims, or have been a lot of fraudulent claims with the covid stuff. CBILS and that type of stuff. So again, it’s just going to be another challenge. And HMRC have got their own challenges of trying to retain and attract staff to actually collect this money, and the Treasury putting pressure on them.
ST: And it’s compliance and credit policies I guess; things like that?
MB: It’s all the way through, Sam, and I can’t sit here and list everything; I can’t remember everything! But there’s just a few things that I wanted to mention. Obviously, there’s the invasion of Ukraine, and that pushed prices of fuel and grain and things like this up. You talked about insolvencies there, and there will be an increase in insolvencies, because you think that the knock on effect of all this is going to be that, with the supply chain issues, with inflation, cost of materials going up, there are companies out there who can’t finish projects, they can’t then bill for projects, they can’t get their money in, and they also then can’t pay the staff, and you are going to get companies that are going into all sorts of voluntary arrangements, credit and voluntary arrangements, and insolvency. It’s going to be a real challenge. So, coming back to your question on automation, let me start by saying, visibility, as I said earlier on, is one of the things, across whatever you are doing, whether onboarding a customer, ongoing credit analysis of your customer, collecting money from that customer, applying the cash correctly from that customer; to me, everything has to have visibility to be able to make those quick decisions, and if you haven’t got that visibility, you don’t know where you are at any given time. So, to me, that’s one massive benefit! People often think it’s a cost benefit straight away, but no, it’s actually, for me, it’s doing more with less. So it’s not about how many FTEs can I cut, it’s not about that, it’s about, we’re a growing company, we want to grow, but obviously, we want to grow in the correct way, and obviously, we don’t want to keep have to onboarding people. I can understand that, because there’s a cost to that, there’s training, there’s everything else. So doing more with less, to me, with automation, I think is a huge benefit.
ST: So almost, visibility is, with the customer management side of it, the visibility sits in the middle and, like you were saying, it’s performance monitoring, and credit application; all those kinds of things, monitoring risk, you’ve got to have visibility over all of those different areas.
MB: Yes, you have, and then of course there’s going to be a fight to collect your money. As money dries up, which inevitably it will with high interest rates and insolvencies, and I don’t want to depress people, but it is something that we’ve got to face. I guess the speed that you can collect your money; that goes back to visibility. What is outstanding out there, it goes back to good onboarding, because you’ve got to get your customer master data correct, you are trading with companies that can afford to pay you. I could sit here all day and talk about the benefits of automation! The other thing is employee morale, because you are given good tools to work with, and nice products to work with, and therefore they are happier people!
ST: Yes, I was going to come on to that. Obviously, we always focus on the benefits within an organisation, and that’s excellent, that’s what we want to do. We turn the phrase positive-sum growth. It’s a phrase that means a win-win for not just internal wins, but also external, so customers and suppliers. So, it’s kind of sharing the value of those benefits. Have you seen that and how that works through automation?
MB: Well, again, self-serve isn’t it? I call it self-serve. And I’m not saying that it’s the more you can get your customers to do, it’s not about that either, I don’t want the customer to think, “I want a copy of the invoice, so I’ll just ring up ABC Ltd.”, it’s not about that, it’s about enabling your customers to get their invoices straight away, they can get copies, they can dispute in a portal, they can pay in a portal. So it’s that self-service, it goes far beyond saying, there’s your invoice; pay. It’s about communication, because the systems talk to each other. Just relying on email, to me, and sending an email out there, and hope you get a response at some point, we need to leave those days behind. I think it’s now using the most up-to-date technology, and I think that Esker’s solutions can help. That’s Collections, and we’ve got other good things like a good Claims and Deductions module, which at the moment is doing an absolutely fantastic job in the FMCG, it works really well for those types of suppliers.
ST: Tell us a little bit about that, Martyn.
MB: Well, I used to deal with it. Let’s be honest, you had big supermarkets, pub chains, DIY people; they used to do a lot of promotions.
ST: Is this things like end of shelf promotions and those sort of things that we see in the supermarket?
MB: Yes, and there would be, for example, a few cans of baked beans that were bent, or crooked, and the supermarket would deduct that from the supplier. Never mind that they might have dropped it at their end, they would issue either a debit note or a claim, and they send this nice long remittance back, and then you’ve got to handle that, so the poor supplier sees a remittance with possibly a thousand invoices on it, but then they see maybe 120 deductions at the other end that they’ve then got to manage, which is a shortage of money; they weren’t expecting it. So our Claims and Deductions tool is something that really is fantastic, because it links with the Cash Application module, it will then create that claim within the Claims and Deductions module, and it’s got an inbuilt workflow, an escalation path that you can pre-define based on the deduction, so we are saving customers so much time, in terms of spreadsheets. And again, I’ll go back to the employee morale bit, people don’t want to be sitting there just entering numbers into spreadsheets, and distributing spreadsheets all over the organisation.
ST: I’ve heard that term, because we’ve talked about ‘burn out’, but now this is ‘bore out’, or being bored, have you heard that term? So, people are suffering from ‘bore out’ now, instead of ‘burn out’. And that’s true, they are doing these monotonous manual tasks, and it’s taking their time away really from the real benefit to the organisation, and that’s dealing with customers and suppliers, and making sure that process is seamless and efficient.
MB: Yes, with respect, you’re going to lose good people if all they are doing is boring, repetitive tasks all day, so automation takes that away and allows them to do, as you say, more strategic tasks, and more process improvement. So, yes, I’m trying to keep the benefits of automation to, not really at a functionality level. I’m trying to keep it at a high benefit level. Hopefully that makes some sense anyway.
ST: Yes, absolutely, and I think, in terms of what you are saying, it does span the credit management side of it, it’s helping to facilitate the customer onboarding, credit approval process, and we talked about improving collaboration, visibilities. That’s that key thing that you mentioned that sort of encompasses everything. And just getting better control over that management as well, and lowering the risks.
MB: Absolutely!
ST: Reducing those write offs! And allowances for bad debts and keeping that down.
MB: I was speaking to a company the other day, and I just could not believe what a lot of manual processes they’ve got. This is a big organisation by the way, and I was speaking to the order-to-cash person, and she could not believe how much some of our tools could help her. She basically used the word, that she fell in love with a few of our solutions, and that is really nice to hear somebody say that, because this is why we have developed them, and this is why we believe they will be successful. But I think that people automatically think that automation is just a bottom line thing. It’s not just a bottom line thing, and there is so much more to it, which we’ve mentioned today, so I just want to make that doubly clear really.
ST: Yes, it’s good to hear those things, and myself as well on the marketing side, we hear that from our customers, and working with the customer experience department and it’s great to hear that feedback! We heard from a customer just the other week, and, you don’t like to blow your own trumpet, but when you hear these sort of things, it’s nice to get that feedback, and actually, her team had bought some flowers and put them on her desk, thanking her for having a solution that would automate that process, so it’s incredible to hear that!
MB: There you go, you see! A happy customer and a happy workforce! How about that?
ST: Well, thanks for your time, Martyn. That’s been fascinating, and sort of a short delve into it, and there’s lots more that we could go into but I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us!
MB: You’re welcome, Sam, a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.
This podcast and previous episodes in the series can also be found on Spotify.
