Series 1
Optimizing Q2C Process
Acuiti Talks - Episode 02
Optimizing the Q2C Process: Tackling challenges head-on
In Episode 2, join Manoj Harbhajanka, CEO of Acuiti Labs, as he delves into the key challenges businesses encounter with manual systems, including managing subscriptions, complex pricing structures, and service bundling. The imperative of digital transformation and the integration of advanced technologies like SAP BRIM to enhance operational efficiency are emphasized. Additionally, the crucial role of effective change management in achieving successful implementation is highlighted. Tune in for expert insights on modernizing your Q2C process to stay competitive in todayâs dynamic market.
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Transcript
In this day and age, it is very crucial for businesses from any industry to actually keep optimizing their go to cash processes. It’s a game changer if you want your businesses to keep flourishing and the secret sauce to actually stay ahead of the curve.
So to shed light on this topic, we have our guest speaker again today, Manoj, who is going to be taking us through this and sharing his insights.
So welcome again, Manoj. Thank you for being here with us today. And let me start by asking you the question – In this day and age businesses that are still using manual systems can find it so hard to keep moving and keep their businesses alive, because there can be so many potential challenges to having manual systems.
What do you think would be the core challenges that businesses that are still using manual systems might be facing in this day and age?
There are multiple challenges that people would face, particularly in the quote to cash space in. In this new world that we live in, subscriptions are very common. For example, everybody wants to get out to this whole subscription economy.
And want to have their products or services being sold as a you know subscription, which effectively means that it brings its own challenges straight away. And if you are running manual processes for subscription it straight away makes it very, very difficult for you to be able to call for those payments on a monthly basis or quarterly or annual basis.
Make sure that provisioning of the services happen and then that’s recorded etc. So all of that starts, you know, if you’re doing a manual business, you wouldn’t be able to consider doing this subscription business for example. So that’s the biggest challenge.
And also in, in today’s world, we are for all service providers right for any organization which is into services, business would typically have their services bundled with other services. So even from their own kind of portfolio, they might have multiple services bundled as a package for a customer or they might have third party solutions that they want to build.
Again, that brings its own complexity, and if you were running a manual process, I think that makes it very, very difficult.
Then more and more, you know, we get into the services business we have offers that we provide to our customers, which means complexity in price, more services that you offer more packages, bundles that you provide, the kind of subscriptions you provide means that there’s a lot more complexity in pricing certain industries you know typically have long list of tariffs etc. And different ways in which they invoice their customers. The discount that they might give to their customer. On whether it’s volume based, it’s quantity based or a factor of A, B and C just brings that complexity in pricing.
Could you do that manually? Of course you could do that manually, but you can imagine how complex that would become and how difficult that would be. And we do see this on a regular basis with a lot of customers. They’re typically customers which are half billion dollars and above in revenue, but may be running these manual processes.
Which effectively hinders their growth. They’re not able to tap the new ways of doing business in terms of subscription, bundling, providing those complex offers to the customers, which customers are used to these offers now.
And if you’re not able to grow, I think honestly you are loosing out on business. So that’s that’s kind of, you know, the basic challenges that you would have, but also we’ve come across businesses which are using you know complex macros in order to manage these kind of things for example. And which means that if they have to change something, they are at the risk of breaking the whole system and there is no set way in which they could change that pricing or that bundling. And therefore the time to market could be dramatically long, sometimes could be quite disastrous as well.
So that’s another challenge. And this is kind of the front end part of it, but if you go into the backend, talk about revenue recognition. Or making sure that your invoices are actually accurate to the customer. You’re not sending multiple invoices based on multiple services to the same customer. Are you able to consolidate that and send one single invoice, which is you guarantee that it’s an accurate invoice? You’re not losing any revenue, as in you are not collecting data from various different sources, different events from different places, trying to put them together in a manual system and therefore eventually losing out some of those. And again, it is very common as an example, if you look at logistics industry typically they would lose something like 4 to 5% of their revenue as a revenue leakage and in most cases, you would expect to hear from them that that’s part of doing business. That’s the cost of doing business. But its not. There are ways and you can in which you can completely stem that leakage and we will probably talk about that later. Then in any of the services industries you would like to send accurate invoices you would like to do everything you know absolutely correct. But you might still have customers who might come back and raise a dispute.
So say OK well you say I was in Argentina, but I was not in Argentina. I was only in Brazil. That’s coming up and So that they should be able to raise that dispute and there should be a dispute resolution process, which should also be automated. And that’s what you couldn’t do if you were running on on manual processes or disparate systems or excel sheets, etc. So these are these are the typical challenges that we see and of course for more larger customers, you, you will see other sorts of challenges as well in terms of the complexity of revenue recognition, but we’ll skip that. There’s a long list.
So I think by what you just said, we can see that there are a bunch of challenges that businesses might face when they’re using manual systems. What would you recommend to these businesses? How they could possibly you know, work through these and actually optimize their processes.
For customers who do recognize that they’re facing these challenges they should absolutely look at, 1 – how you could use the new age technology to help them with their transition to this new world through digitalization, through business transformation and definitely support with proper change management process to go along with it. In terms of technologies 0 by area, we work with SAP technologies because they are best in class. We have SAP BRIM which is billing revenue, innovation and innovation management.
In this day and age, it is very crucial for businesses from any industry to actually keep optimizing their go to cash processes. It’s a game changer if you want your businesses to keep flourishing and the secret sauce to actually stay ahead of the curve.
So to shed light on this topic, we have our guest speaker again today, Manoj, who is going to be taking us through this and sharing his insights.
So welcome again, Manoj. Thank you for being here with us today. And let me start by asking you the question – In this day and age businesses that are still using manual systems can find it so hard to keep moving and keep their businesses alive, because there can be so many potential challenges to having manual systems.
What do you think would be the core challenges that businesses that are still using manual systems might be facing in this day and age?
There are multiple challenges that people would face, particularly in the code to cash space in. In this new world that we live in, subscriptions are very common. For example, everybody wants to get out to this whole subscription economy.
And want to have their products or services being sold as a you know subscription, which effectively means that it brings its own challenges straight away. And if you are running manual processes for subscription it straight away makes it very, very difficult for you to be able to call for those payments on a monthly basis or quarterly or annual basis.
Make sure that provisioning of the services happen and then that’s recorded etc. So all of that starts, you know, if you’re doing a manual business, you wouldn’t be able to consider doing this subscription business for example. So that’s the biggest challenge.
And also in, in today’s world, we are for all service providers right for any organization which is into services, business would typically have their services bundled with other services. So even from their own kind of portfolio, they might have multiple services bundled as a package for a customer or they might have third party solutions that they want to build.
Again, that brings its own complexity, and if you were running a manual process, I think that makes it very, very difficult.
Then more and more, you know, we get into the services business we have offers that we provide to our customers, which means complexity in price, more services that you offer more packages, bundles that you provide, the kind of subscriptions you provide means that there’s a lot more complexity in pricing certain industries you know typically have long list of tariffs etc. And different ways in which they invoice their customers. The discount that they might give to their customer. On whether it’s volume based, it’s quantity based or a factor of A, B and C just brings that complexity in pricing.
Could you do that manually? Of course you could do that manually, but you can imagine how complex that would become and how difficult that would be. And we do see this on a regular basis with a lot of customers. They’re typically customers which are half billion dollars and above in revenue, but may be running these manual processes.
Which effectively hinders their growth. They’re not able to tap the new ways of doing business in terms of subscription, bundling, providing those complex offers to the customers, which customers are used to these offers now.
And if you’re not able to grow, I think honestly you are loosing out on business. So that’s that’s kind of, you know, the basic challenges that you would have, but also we’ve come across businesses which are using you know complex macros in order to manage these kind of things for example. And which means that if they have to change something, they are at the risk of breaking the whole system and there is no set way in which they could change that pricing or that bundling. And therefore the time to market could be dramatically long, sometimes could be quite disastrous as well.
So that’s another challenge. And this is kind of the front end part of it, but if you go into the backend, talk about revenue recognition. Or making sure that your invoices are actually accurate to the customer. You’re not sending multiple invoices based on multiple services to the same customer. Are you able to consolidate that and send one single invoice, which is you guarantee that it’s an accurate invoice? You’re not losing any revenue, as in you are not collecting data from various different sources, different events from different places, trying to put them together in a manual system and therefore eventually losing out some of those. And again, it is very common as an example, if you look at logistics industry typically they would lose something like 4 to 5% of their revenue as a revenue leakage and in most cases, you would expect to hear from them that that’s part of doing business. That’s the cost of doing business. But its not. There are ways and you can in which you can completely stem that leakage and we will probably talk about that later. Then in any of the services industries you would like to send accurate invoices you would like to do everything you know absolutely correct. But you might still have customers who might come back and raise a dispute.
So say OK well you say I was in Argentina, but I was not in Argentina. I was only in Brazil. That’s coming up and So that they should be able to raise that dispute and there should be a dispute resolution process, which should also be automated. And that’s what you couldn’t do if you were running on on manual processes or disparate systems or excel sheets, etc. So these are these are the typical challenges that we see and of course for more larger customers, you, you will see other sorts of challenges as well in terms of the complexity of revenue recognition, but we’ll skip that. There’s a long list.
So I think by what you just said, we can see that there are a bunch of challenges that businesses might face when they’re using manual systems. What would you recommend to these businesses? How they could possibly you know, work through these and actually optimize their processes.
Then we have the cloud service this is, you know, private cloud solution, then we have public cloud solutions such as. CPQ – configure price quote, subscription billing and entitlement management on the public cloud. We use that as well to deliver the same quote to cash process on the public cloud. And these are the best in class solutions that we have there.
For me, I mean, I would say that yes, you should use SAP. But of course you should. You should check them out. You should look at other competitors as well, but you would need technology to support you in this transition.
If you were looking at complex, so again, it also depends on what kind of challenges do you Have? Not everybody will have the same challenges. So if you were having a complex pricing requirement or you know complex bundling requirements or your recognition is more important, so you need to look at the solution and the combination of those solutions based on that. And I would definitely recommend that like I said previously definitely look for the best in cloud solution from a technology standpoint, but look at find the consulting organization that can help you that have been through the that journey with other you know similar and similar companies in the same industry. I think that’s that’s really a good recipe for success.
And one thing that keep hopping on and keep telling everybody is make sure you’re focusing on change management because with these technologies with these solutions if implemented correctly, you can create a lot of benefit, but that will only come if you change management coupled with these implementations.
Yes, I think I 100% agree. I think the pace that the world is at, it’s very important that businesses that want to succeed actually, you know, keep their businesses alive change and actually develop their systems and processes according to the world.
That’s absolutely right Rhea. This is what needs to happen if people want to stay in the way or need to get ahead in the race. They would definitely have to look at this whole quote to cash process, automating it. We typically call this as you know, if it’s implemented right, it should be like operations, which means from the point you’ve contract with the customer to the point the customer actually pays you it should be an automated process lights so process. There should be no involvement, no manual intervention for you to be able to do business.
Amazing. Yeah, that sounds very insightful. Would you have any closing thoughts for this forum now as we come to the end of this episode.
I just kind of summarize what I said earlier, which is yes, there are multiple challenges that people face in the quote to cash process. There are different, you know challenges for different organizations. But look at those challenges, understand those challenges that you’re facing. And if you’re implementing a solution for your getting the consultants and make sure you get the right consultants who have the knowledge and experience of doing this, get the technology that will assist you in delivering the answers to the challenges that you have. And of course I will say this again change management change management make sure you got that right.
Yes, sounds great. I think this is a very insightful session for our viewers and we look forward to the next time we have you on board with us. Thak you Manoj.
