Risk management and fraud prevention have always been important to Equans. The company has regular audits in place. 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. Not particularly sophisticated but a clever build by somebody within the team. 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,” explained Lesley. As the money had gone out the door, Equans’ cash flow was already hampered. And 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. Not least, only being able to accept Excel formats. 

“If they were PDFs, we had to download the data from two systems and run them through an inhouse 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,” said Lesley. For master vendor data management, Lesley said they have good controls for setting up suppliers and bank details. They also trawl 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.

Incorporating new technology can make people feel vulnerable. How will their role change and will there be redundancies? These are valid concerns and Lesley highlighted how important it is to involve your team at every stage.

Digitisation isn’t about making people redundant. It’s about getting rid of those repetitive tasks and improving peoples’ roles. We involved everyone in the process, from start to finish. They felt confident it was working for them and would do what they needed,” she said. Worn down by existing manual processes, the team welcomed technology that could help them do their jobs better and faster. And in turn, unlocking more opportunity for professional development.

Like with most companies, an onboarding hurdle Lesley had to overcome was IT. As Equans was still separating from Engie, requests for software requirements were endless.

How would she get IT to focus on implementing Xelix? Lesley explained: “After our IT team spoke to Xelix, they could see how easy it would be to implement. They felt confident they could fit the work in around other support commitments. Plus, all the required security existed already. After everything was setup, we got great feedback from our IT team about working with Xelix. This was a massive thing for us.”