In recent years, business changes at EG Group have created challenges for their P2P team. Divestments, team changes and various systems have created challenges for a team spread across multiple locations and required them to take on additional responsibilities.  
 
These changes are only made more complex by a number of different systems, specifically ERPs. The group has five different instances of SAP across different regions. Combined with ongoing S/4 HANA migrations, these complexities have negative knock-on effects on data, visibility and control. 

Upgrading ERPs is a high-risk time for any business – and relying on ERP and manual controls just isn’t enough.  

Katie Chew, Head of P2P at EG Group, explains, “When you change systems and have two running at the same time, that’s when errors happen.”    

Before Xelix, EG Group relied heavily on manual Accounts Payable controls and often only caught errors like duplicate and overpayments after they’d happened. The team was spending hours manually checking for errors. As a result, they found it difficult to catch all the errors, and whatever they did catch was money that had already left the business and needed to be recovered.  

As part of EG Group's transformation project, they sought a proactive solution to support Accounts Payable processes.  

Xelix monitors your data to flag duplicate invoices, posting errors, overpayment risks and suspicious activity before your pay run. Before we're up and running, you and your CFO can see value straight away when we apply our technology backwards to drive immediate cost savings. As soon as EG Group came on board, Xelix found £750k in historic overpayments for them to recover, and since then, they've been able to actively prevent nearly £20m in overpayments. 

As Katie says, “It’s proactivity versus reactivity that’s made a huge difference for us. Now, we can keep errors from happening instead of waiting to correct them after the fact.”   

Katie’s team is a lot happier too. Gone are the days of manually checking for errors, and teams are protected against mistakes and the finger pointing that comes with them.

Spotting payment errors in the moment makes a difference to EG Group’s bottom line. However, the ultimate goal for any AP or P2P team is to drive process improvements that keep these mistakes from happening in the first place. In a work environment with changing systems, a lack of visibility makes it difficult to spot process flaws and drive corrective actions.   
 
Katie explains, “When you’re managing a large expanse of people and suppliers across at least 5 ERP systems, it’s hard to see where things are going wrong. If you wanted to see if the UK paid something, but it went through Benelux, that wouldn’t get picked up. And you can’t stay on top of statement reconciliation, which would give you more visibility.”  

Xelix flags mistakes such as duplicates and invoice errors before payment, as well as the reasons for the invoice errors, so Katie can see what’s going wrong and drive corrective action.  

She says, “We’ve implemented a lot of payment controls both in our process and using the Xelix platform that allow us to check before the payment run and use a sign-off sheet, and we wouldn’t know where to implement controls if we couldn’t see the source of the issues.”    

Additionally, with Xelix, EG Group gets end-to-end automated supplier statement reconciliation. What was previously a tedious and time-consuming task that led to fewer statements being reconciled can now be done in a matter of seconds and increase coverage. 

Centralised supplier statement reconciliation and increased coverage gives Katie the visibility and insights she needs to make sure her team’s processes are as efficient as possible. Additionally, Katie will see have fully compliant audit trail, making her external audits faster and more painless.    

With growing and expiring data due to divestments, acquisitions and more, and no central point of truth, the vendor file becomes messy and an undesirable task amongst team with responsibility falling somewhere between AP and Procurement.   

Katie explains this issue is especially difficult when it comes to managing master vendor data. Multiple ERPs mean multiple vendor databases. She says, “Having a lot of vendors open makes for a messier ledger. When you've got a massive master data file, you’re not getting the benefits of scale. What you want is to have one good deal with one supplier.”   

Duplicated vendors split your time between multiple suppliers, giving you less time to foster good relationships, and duplicates can leave you vulnerable to errors and risk.   

Xelix gives Katie and her team the holistic insight she was missing. Using our Vendors module, her team has cleansed their data, moving  from 22K to 15K vendors. And this is just phase one. 

She says, “Most ERPs won’t cross check vendors for duplicates, so you need some sort of functionality that will surface that for you. Xelix highlighted where we had multiple of the same vendor, and now we make most of the vendors we do have and can focus our time on building good relationships with these suppliers.”