Growth and Optimization
The Digital Transformation of Spend Management: Journeying Towards Streamlined Processes
When a company is small, its business processes are usually simple because there aren’t that many people or touchpoints involved. As a company grows and more people work together across different departments, those same processes can become unwieldy and no longer make sense for the business. At that point, most companies must transition to a new solution, streamline their existing processes, and establish additional internal controls to improve efficiency. This can be an overwhelming and time-consuming journey, but fortunately, for those who succeed, it’s well worth the effort.
In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Jenny Chen, Senior Accountant at Dermalogica, and Jeanne Dion, Vice President of the Value Experience Team at SAP Concur, talk about Dermalogica’s recent digital transformation, the approach the company took to change management, and why intentionally taking a long-term view in creating scalable systems and processes was crucial to Dermalogica’s success. Below are some highlights from their conversation.
You can listen to this episode on Apple | Spotify | Google or your favorite place to find podcasts.
Assessing company needs and charting a course for the future
Over time, Dermalogica grew from a small, five-person company to more than 150 employees today. It had a variety of internal paper-based processes that were inefficient and had spread to other areas of the business and become far more complicated than they needed to be. Worse, these processes often led to overspending and increased the risk of duplication, errors, and fraud in financial reporting.
To simplify the company’s processes and continue to support its growth, Dermalogica sought to:
- Gain a better understanding of its existing processes and its desired future state.
- Digitize and automate its manual, paper-based processes and increase its internal controls to improve efficiency.
- Find and implement new solutions.
- Help employees transition to the new solutions and oversee the change management process.
6 steps to secure buy-in of new spend management solutions
Dermalogica selected and implemented the SAP Concur travel platform, the expense platform, and the purchase request and invoice platform. Chen said her overarching goal for the implementation was to “make sure that everyone in our company was on the same track and that it didn’t disrupt their workflow, that efficiencies were seamless, and that they (our employees) didn’t see the effects of trying to create these efficiencies and improvements in our organization.”
To accomplish that, Chen and her team:
- Looked at the company’s values, the types of stakeholders they had, and where those individuals’ strengths and weaknesses were
- Met with people in management, as well as those on the ground level to discuss the pain points they were experiencing and where the company was headed. During this time, Chen said she deliberately avoided talking about the changes in terms of shifts that were going to happen in the first week, first month, first three months, and so on.
- Researched and implemented new solutions that would not only work for Dermalogica at that time but also well into the future
- Planned the entire platform around existing workflows and what users could handle, and then gradually infused changes over time
- Created workshops that addressed each specific department’s pain points. Chen and her team also learned the administrative side of the platform to assist everyone.
- Proactively went into the system on a monthly basis and identified any issues so that no one was left behind. For example, if someone in their organization typically created expense reports every week but then only created one or two a month, Chen and her team would contact them to find out why and ask if they needed any help completing their expense reports.
The end result for Dermalogica was a signification reduction in the amount of time required for the company to process invoices (from 30-35 hours a week a month to one hour) and allowed for faster payment turnarounds. Supplier invoices are now paid on time, and Dermalogica has complete and real-time visibility into all its expenses and payments.
Moreover, Dermalogica won the SMB Digital Innovation award in 2022, as well as an honorable mention for The Best Run in 2022. “By the time we won that Innovations Award, they had no idea what had happened,” Chen said. “They just knew that they had changed in the last five years, and it was a gradual, seamless process in our organization.” And that, as well as the new solutions, have allowed and will continue to allow Dermalogica to keep moving forward for many years to come.