Risk management and fraud prevention have always been important to Equans. They use regular audits to support these processes. One called INCOME (internal control of management efficiency) requires managers to have strong controls in place.

“What we had for monitoring overpayments was a souped-up in-house Microsoft tool with macros. It would look at invoice numbers and values for exact matches and highlight them for investigation. We picked up some issues, but always after the event. And it took a lot of manual work to achieve this,” explains Lesley.

Money would go out the door, and Equans’ cash flow was already hampered. Lesley’s team would then have to spend time liaising with the supplier to retrieve it.

The statement reconciliation process was also fraught with difficulties, especially because they could only accept Excel formats. “If they were PDFs, we had to download the data from two systems and run them through an in-house invoice splitter. That often led to missing data, so the team would then manually populate the information. Some account statements could take up to an hour to manage. We often didn’t get the reconciliation done before the supplier sent a reminder. And you've got all that clutter in your system. It was soul-destroying for the team,” says Lesley.

For master vendor data management, Lesley says they have good controls for setting up suppliers and bank details. The team also trawls through suppliers annually to spot inactivity. “But after all our laborious efforts to pull the data together from two systems, we'd be exhausted. And we hadn't got to analysis and interrogation yet. We couldn’t drill down to find trends or troubleshoot areas either. It was all very painful,” she said.

Equans was acutely aware of its P2P challenges when Xelix got in touch. What particularly intrigued them was being able to resolve everything with a single AI-powered tool.

Lesley explains: “We were already thinking about our challenges when Xelix approached us. We knew we wanted to exploit technology to remove manual activities and achieve more. Getting a resolution for all our AP problems from one supplier was unique. We knew we could get a statement tool or find a supplier offering proactive payment error detection. And we could get more reporting through someone else. But getting all that from one tool was unheard of.”

Because it's an investment, the Xelix team helps prospective customers create a business case for senior leaders, which helped Lesley get the investment over the line.

“Xelix was the only company to impress all the various audiences involved in our selection process. We were sold on the demonstration. It provided invaluable data for our business case to the CFO. And we didn’t know we had some of the problems Xelix highlighted. This all helped the cost-benefit analysis stand up. It was important for us to present the value this tool could bring us. Having customisation to suit our personal requirements was a game changer. And offering unlimited licenses was, once again, unique,” she said.