Moderna became a household name overnight during the pandemic. Tasked with fast-tracking Covid vaccine deliveries, it grew from a small biotech firm to a global player with offices in over 30 countries. All in the space of four years.
Such rapid growth had a huge impact on Accounts Payable. Heather Barber, Director, Business Process Owner (AP/T&E) explains how Xelix helped her team handle the scale-up with confidence.
$500,000 returned to Moderna's AP team in five months
Heather joined Moderna in early 2022. And she discovered an incredibly fast-paced environment.
“Our Chief Accounting Officer described it as driving a racing car while you’re still building it. Vaccine production was clearly our biggest priority. That meant paying - even pre-paying - materials vendors quickly. You could onboard a vendor, create the purchase order, create the invoice, and pay it, all on the same day,” said Heather.
This presented a lot of risk. So, Heather’s first port of call was to arrange a recovery audit. But as she looked for a recovery firm, the Director of P2P Operations was talking to Xelix about automating supplier statement reconciliations.
“We saw that Xelix could mean so much to us. Duplicate invoice and vendor detection, plus automated statement reconciliation. Only at the end of the conversation did we appreciate we’d get a retrospective payment audit too,” explained Heather.
When you become a Xelix customer, you receive a free audit of historical payments. Whilst Xelix isn’t a recovery audit firm (our audit doesn’t include recovery), this insight provides huge added value. For Moderna, our retrospective payment audit helped them recover $500,000 in five months, delivering immediate ROI.
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Achieving 100% coverage for supplier statement reconciliation
Before onboarding Xelix, Moderna would focus its attention on the most complex vendor statements, to the detriment of others.
“The largest, noisiest ones got our attention. And it took a lot of manual work. Some could have 200 invoices and a large amount of cash on account. It could take an Accounts Associate hours, or even days, to reconcile. For smaller statements, by the time we got to them, the information was no longer timely. So, we were always chasing our tail on those.
With Xelix, we’re now reconciling 100% of our statements. As soon as they come in, we reconcile them. That’s a big win for time saved. But also, for team morale.
Associates are building their careers and can now free up time to work on more interesting projects, such as a new system implementation or Six Sigma Lean projects. This helps build their resumé too.
Sometimes, you can feel like the unsung hero in AP. You put in hours of work and don’t necessarily get recognition. It’s boosted morale to see Moderna invest in technology that makes AP processes more efficient and improves our daily lives. It’s also made people feel their work is more visible,” said Heather.
Find out how Xelix fully automates 100% of supplier statement reconciliations >
Getting visibility on productivity, process blockers and the reasons behind AP errors
The visibility Heather highlights relates to Xelix’s reporting module. Providing customisable insight in one place, users can quickly build reports. They can track things like the value of duplicate invoices or how many statements have been reconciled. They can also spot trends and look for causes.
Heather highlighted a further important benefit from making the reporting module available to the team.
“When most of us are working at least part-time from home it can be challenging to feel connected. And that impacts employee wellbeing, which is important to Moderna.
We can see exactly what the team is working on with Xelix’s reporting. We can also spot any roadblocks the supervisor can support people with. Employees see the progress of others too, which helps them feel connected. It’s a great way to take the team’s temperature on a daily basis,” she said.
Learn more about Xelix’s Reports module >
Staying on top of vendor queries
Moderna continues to grow quickly. Offices in China, Portugal, and Saudi Arabia are imminent. That means Xelix must easily scale too.
“We’re expanding to further countries every month. It’s great to have a standard way to fold these new offices into our organisation. For AP, it’s painless. And it’s painless for our business associates too,” said Heather.
As for developing AP technology, Moderna wants to create an AI chatbot. The aim is to answer simple AP questions or direct the query to the right human. The high volume of vendor queries is a common problem for many of our customers, so we got to work.
Our brand new Helpdesk module solves the challenge of keeping on top of vendor queries. Based on user preferences, our Helpdesk solution categorises inbound vendor queries to support tickets. Using generative AI, it will then look up the query, and when possible, create a helpful response for the vendor. The Helpdesk module is due to launch in 2024.
Learn more about Xelix's Helpdesk solution >
Heather summed up her Xelix experience: “Our relationship with Xelix is unusual and fantastic. The team we worked with during the sales process was the same team that implemented Xelix for us. Those same people support us day to day. We feel Xelix is invested in Moderna’s success. And they share our values of integrity, ethics, innovation, and agility.”
