How Source-to-Pay Automation Helps Align Supply Chain Strategies in APAC

All right, welcome to all of you to this new webinar organized by the Global Supply Chain Council in partnership with Esker. Today's topic is on how source-to-pay automation helps align supply chain strategies in APAC. So we're very happy again to have this discussion going on. Today in partnership with our technology provider Esker. And so this webinar again is going to be interactive. If you have any questions for the speakers, you can ask at any time during the presentation by just clicking on the Q&A button located at the bottom right corner of your screen. We will take your questions at, you know, between properly the presentations, and we will prioritize those questions as well during our discussion. This event is again going to be just 55 minutes, so if you're worried about your time, you know, don't worry, it will be over by 5 PM Hong Kong/Singapore. So stay with us, especially towards the end as we get all your questions. Today we're joined by 3 speakers who are going to be sharing their insight and their experience. We have Charlie Chee, who is Managing Director for Asia at Esker, based in Singapore. He will also be joined by Jonathan Paul, who is the Enterprise Sales and Account Specialist at MarketDojo, which is also an Esker company. They also have invited one of our key customers, Jesse Kok, who is the Director of Finance and Business Analysis at Swinburne University of Technology, based in Malaysia. Very glad again to have some of those speakers, and we're looking forward for the discussion. And I'd like to welcome first Charlie to join us. Hi, Charlie, how are you?

Hi, hi. Thank you for introducing me, Max, and very good afternoon to everyone and welcome to the webinar.

Thank you. So go ahead, we are all here for you to hear you.

All right. So thank you for having me again. So in the interest of time, I'll dive in a bit. I'd like to share about the market trends and challenges in the Asia Pacific. So what are the top challenges facing CPOs, Chief Procurement Officers, last year, this year, and also moving forward? So what we are seeing, if you're looking at the screen right now on your right— left-hand side, the most biggest challenges, I'll say the top 2, the one, the highest will be the inflation. And second, resourcing the talent for the procurement side of things. And these are from international report study. And what we also seeing a trend is basically in the procurement professions, a lot and lot more the procurement professionals are reporting to the finance into the area of the CFO. And this trend has been shifting and it's been quite apparent since 2018. And we are seeing this, and some of you may be wondering why procurement is into the finance. So the reason is because there is a common path and companies like to be more efficient in that perspective. There is a 16% move in terms of the trend that is shifting. This is the highest among all the other business functions. And these are quite, how would I say, quite common, right? This is happening, and we also seeing a very interesting trend that's happening in the market that most of the sourcing activity is happening in APAC. Yeah, a critical factor why this is happening is mainly due to the growth, the GDP growth in this region. Yeah, the emerging market and the developing economics. you will see 55% for South, Southeast Asia plus East Asia. That combined is coming close to 80%. And the latest International Monetary Fund is forecasting that Asia will continue to grow 20% faster than the rest of the world. However, saying that, there is still a lot of factors that's happening today. I think if you're looking at the next chart, one of the reasons why these are moving is basically geographical risk, right? The geopolitical situation, the war that is happening, the economic tension between China, US, the Israel-Palestine war, the Ukraine war. So things are moving from the European market, the US market, and most of the sourcing activity especially talent as well, are more focused on APAC. However, having said this, there's no denying every industry, sector, and company operates on different requirements. So it may vary, but in general, this is what we are seeing. And Asia Pacific will remain a growth-oriented region, and we would continue to see those sourcing activities will continue to be central to be more epicenter. The Asia Pacific will be the epicenter of these sourcing activities. And in line with that, thanks to Gartner, they have actually looked at what are the priorities, the top 10 priorities for the sourcing as well procurement activities. And you're looking right now, I've actually out of the 10, it's shaded in red or in the red box. There are actually 7 of them. What we see that is very much technology-driven. I'm not saying that the rest, the visions, the model, operating model, and the people are not technology-driven. They are more subtly, but the other 7 is very clearly you need tools, automation tools, AI to be able to help you to focus on these top 10 priorities. And we are talking about what are those activities we are talking about, yeah, the focus on source-to-pay. You hear the keyword sourcing strategy, yeah, strategic sourcing. So we are looking at across the board, companies are more focused according to this research where procurement strategy is important, the technology is equally important. The organization, how it's been shared, whether it's operating in silo, in a shared service environment, or a GBS environment. How do you then measure all this performance? Tracking all your spend. Where are those sourcing activities? Is it happening in APAC with a particular vendor, for example? And as well as managing a supplier. What we see is no longer much a vendor-supplier and a customer relationship, buyer relationship. is more of business partnership. How do you manage this relationship to bring it to the next level? And as well managing risk in terms of logistics, in terms of tariff, in terms of the geopolitics. Where are your backup resources? Where are your backup suppliers? So all these basically in line with what we shared earlier, you require tools. Gone are the days these are being managed manually. in the past is most probably localized in your country in a specific region. Today sourcing are going global. So you may be based in a specific country in a different region, but sourcing in APAC, for example. So you really need tools, applications, and automations to really help you on that. What we are also seeing is the role is also changing. So in the past, I think it's very common. I think most of you procurement professionals when I heard this thing called P2P. S2P has become the lingo, what we are saying, and thanks to Gartner who actually remapped this. Now it's more commonly called S2P, source-to-pay, instead of just procure-to-pay. So what's the difference? On the screen you will see a quick summary comparison. S2P is talking about more strategic instead of just transactional. It's more end-to-end instead of just focusing on operation, for example, manufacturing only. Source-to-pay is across the organization. It's more end-to-end. It's more focused on collaboration rather than transaction. Supplier-buyer relationship now is focusing more on business partner relationship. Obviously, cost saving. That's profitability-driven organizations. And you will need now more analytical Based on data, the data that you have. Where is your— who is your top 10 supplier? Who is your strategic supplier? How much are you spending with them? What kind of discount or competitive pricing you are getting compared to the market? So you really need to, and thanks to automation, thanks to AI, this is now possible. And the earlier 2 slides or 3 slides, I talk about more and more procurement people reporting to the finance organization. Yeah, so you see, actually, it's actually subtly been there, but it's just more visible today. On your left, you will see the key goals of CFO, the finance typically, and on your right, you will see the goals of procurement. What is interesting, what is in the middle, right, that both share common value is the bottom line, is the profitability and cost optimizations. So it only makes perfect sense that these are now being merged, right? And it's a powerful couple in that perspective. You will most probably hear as well a lot of talk about the office of the CFO. So no longer just the finance is no longer just talking about reporting P&L, quarterly closing, year-end closing, audit. It's more than that. So today the coverage including an element of IT. Yeah, and element of ESG. And it's not surprising procurement is also moving in that direction. Yeah, so definitely something that is really emerging, and we see this across not only just in the market, in my current customer space, we're really seeing the CFO is taking more. And that does not mean there is no more role for the CFO. Yeah, the CPO, the Chief Procurement Officer role remains, just that now it's It's been slowly merged and the finance is taking more of a key lead role. What is the spend that we're talking about moving from P2P into S2P? So you will see 3 layers vertically: the strategic, the operation, and the transactional. In a P2P environment, the focus is more on transactional, so you can see the pyramid. Where most of the activities are taken there. Operational, about 30% of things. Strategic is only about 20%. And if you move along with tools, empowered by tools, automations, AI, ideally you should be moved into the digital, the end of the equation, where strategic is 60% of the time, where professionals should be spending their time looking at data, analyzing and deriving strategy, how to benefit organization. And that means 10% transactional. It's the inverse of the pyramid. So we are seeing this movement. Some companies are— most companies are already in the middle, whether it's semi-manual or fully automated. But the goal is to really reach the end where you got a 60-30-10. 60% strategic operational, only 30% and transactional should be only 10%. I think all of us been in the industry working as a professional, I think transactional and keying data is least of our appetite. And I don't see, honestly, from my perspective, there's much career growth or career advancement when we are talking about data entry. So why S2P? S2P bringing actually much more value to organization. been a strategic initiative in an organization. The market has evolved, right? So I think procurement professionals should not be just depending on ERP, right? Even though you have the tools in the ERP that are not necessarily the best of breed, and it doesn't necessarily fit your business operation. Yeah, so we see that companies adopting automation solutions or third-party solutions that are best of breed. It should also bring an element of the future, not only just what's in the past, what's current, but be able to help you to reach in the next 2-3 years where do you want to go. It brings you competitive edge. Obviously, on the business side, bringing efficiency, be able to help you to streamline your process, and definitely access to data where you can see across the board all the KPIs of the organisation. And more importantly, what's the business value it brings from the finance perspective? Remember just now we have the slides where we are the powerful couple. It brings all these benefits, the improved profitability, be able to see performance both individually, as a department, as a company. Really have more money to spend? Not really the case. You should be spending less by bringing more value. And obviously on the procurement side, you'll be able to centralize data. It has been unfortunately the case, a lot of investment typically are more in the business side, in the finance. Procurement not necessarily having the maximum investment. So till today, with strategic outsourcing and become critical, you need more automations, you need tools to be able to centralize your data, be able to analyze, and in compliance with ESG, which is a big and hot topic today. More and more organizations, you are compliant to be in compliance with ESG. And obviously I spoke about being in a business partner collaboration, not a buyer-supplier relationship. So what you see here right next is basically the S2P landscape. So I'm not going to dive in. I think all of us been in the procurement world knows about this. What is a requisition? What is a purchase order? Delivery order? Yeah, but these are basically the fundamental business, high-level business process flow of all the respective activities that needs to be done. So how to align? Having said so much about the importance of sourcing being a strategic initiative in an organization, And in terms of the supply chain, it's one on the upstream. Sourcing is the upstream of this supply chain management part of things. So I'm happy to share, Asker, us here today sharing what our perspective is. We have offering on what we call Asker On Demand, our cloud solutions, and on the S2P side, on the wheel, you will see that we have most of the solutions that be able to bring you the full end-to-end cycle of it, starting from sourcing, supplier management, be able to manage your contract with your supplier, procurement. That's more perhaps the indirect purchases. And obviously, once you source, you issue a purchase order, eventually you receive the goods and services, you will need to pay your business partner. So that's where accounts payable comes in. And to complete the loop, the expense management for all those indirect spend or your employee expenses. Obviously, on the other hand, on the right-hand side, is the invoice-to-cash. And I'm proud to say Esker is the only one in the world that is offering both cycles, S2P as well as invoice-to-cash, on a single platform. So what typically companies do when they want to do automations? So what I'm looking at is what are the specific steps to take before source-to-pay automation can begin?

So are you ready for automations? How do you assess your organization readiness? So one of the things is, firstly, you need to take stock or really actually identify your current process. Right? What is working? What is not working? And what can you standardize? What do you need to change? Is it the change management? Where is very important in any success outcome of any automation project? What can you standardize? Right? Between countries or between your departments. Next, please. Then we talk about. Engaging your stakeholders. So any investment, especially in automations, you need a budget. Also, you need your stakeholders, your management, your senior management, and some companies need the board of directors' approval. So you need to engage this. And any realignment of your process, changes of your systems, you need to also manage change management. And a lot of time, a lot of organizations that we see, In some of our customers, this is really underestimated, the value of change management within your organization. Having the best breed of tool may not necessarily bring you the right result if you don't implement the right change management. Next, please, Max. 2 more slides to go on this. Also talking about what are the data that you have been capturing today. How can we integrate? How many systems do you have, right? And, uh, what are the processes you have so that we can integrate and streamline into a central platform like Aska where you can actually interface with multiple systems and centralize Aska as the main key dashboard for all your tracking and KPI tracking? Yeah, so you need to assess where are the source of your data, right? Because end of the day, we need data to work to really bring the right result.

Next, please, Max.

Obviously, timeline, availability of your resource, because solution can be implemented. It also requires participation and involvement of your team in your organization who knows your business process the best. So likely, who is your— you need to identify all your available key resources and ability to be able to participate in this project. And need to be aligned with your other important activities in your organisation. For example, your half-yearly closing, your yearly closing, your stocktakes. All this needs to be ready to be assessed. Are you ready? All this needs to be put in place before we can really kickstart the project. Next, please. That's a quick overview to assess your readiness. So we mentioned about AI, and I believe outside of this forum today, most of you have been hearing AI as the buzzword of today. Yeah, so what's the role of AI? How can that help? Next, please. So in Asker, all our solutions are embedded with AI, right? The marketing terminology is called Asker Synergy, right? Layman, I will say it is a transparent AI. You can't see it, you can't touch it, but it's embedded. Basically today, by default, all our solutions have embedded AI. What we are saying is let AI do all the transactional work, do all the analytical data entry as much as possible. The professionals, the valuable resources should be focusing on analytical and driving strategy. This is a glimpse of what has been embedded, and actually there is more. We have a lot of patterns through our AI that is registered and owned by Esker. In fact, not in the slide that you are seeing right now, is we embedded ChatGPT in there as well. Next, please. I'm at the end of what I'd like to share today. So that is invited one of my customers, Swinburne and Imperial Brand, to share with you some success story that you can perhaps bring some visibility and experience to be shared with all of you. So I will hand over to John from Asker, from Market Dojo, is an Asker company, to talk about Imperial Brand, yeah, that they have implemented Asker sourcing solution. Over to you, John.

Thanks very much, Charlie.

Thank you, Charlie. Yeah, and thank you, John. Maybe before we jump into John's presentation, we had a poll as well, Charlie, that you wanted to use, right?

Yes, yes. Sorry, I overlooked that.

Right.

So yeah, perhaps we just do a quick poll before the case study sharing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So if we can play the poll, Danny, go ahead. And then we can get everybody to respond to that.

Yeah, so we appreciate if everyone can take a few minutes to respond to the poll. It will give us a good insight and sharing as well where these things are happening and what's your thought as well.

So the question is, what are the top challenges your organization faces in the source-to-pay process? So please click. I have time-consuming manual, lack of visibility, inefficient workflows, poor supply collaboration, and a problem with data. So if you can click on whatever, you know, it relates to the challenge that you face, it would be great. So then we, we're gonna let you respond and then we're gonna move on to John's presentation. Okay, so take your time and then after the case study, maybe we can show the result, then we can comment on it.

Right.

So it's a multiple choice, you can take more than one or you can select all of the above. Yeah, so it's not— you're not restricted to only one choice, multiple choice.

Yeah, thanks, Charlie. Okay, John, welcome.

Brilliant, thank you very much. Hi everyone, so my name is John Paul, I'm a Strategic Account Manager at MarketDojo. So I help our customers bring the solution online and get used to potentially, in a lot of them, a new way of undertaking procurement activities. So this is going to be one of the case studies in which I've done that 5 years ago. So I'll talk very briefly at quite a high level about what Imperial Brands did. So Imperial Brands have been with us 5 years and they are a global FMCG company. They have 30,000 employees around the world and revenue of £30 billion. So essentially they came to us because they had an SAP solution and they found that it was causing a lot of issues. So 20% of documented issues were actually coming out of lack of visibility in the sourcing process. So the issue was the solution was very complex to use, it was very difficult. Their users and their strategic sourcing employees were not actually making use of it. So they were essentially paying for something that was just sitting on the shelf, and that was creating more issues that started to back up quite a lot. So they decided to go and look for something that maybe was away from the household brands and the big names that have been around for a very long time, and they wanted to find something easy to use and that was straightforward. One of my favorite quotes from the gentleman that actually implemented this across the entire company and led the implementation was that they had a tank that was sitting in their garage, and every time they needed to use it, it was very expensive. It was incredibly complex. There were buttons and switches. And what the company needed was a 4x4 that was just press go, drive from A to B to help their users actually do their job. because it was taking more time than it needed to. So with that, we decided to explore how strategic sourcing and best of breed could replace their current S2P process within Imperial Brands. So, yep, next slide. Sorry, if we could move on to the next slide, that'd be great, Max.

Max, if you can move to the next slide.

We'll get there.

Yeah.

Okay, well, in the meantime, what I can do, I'll talk about it anyway as we're waiting to get there. So essentially what that looked like in terms of, I mean, it just has the figures that I'm about to talk about. So what it looked like is a 6-week implementation. We had 100 users around the world. And that's in every region on every continent that were making use of our tool. And we found that we got a 5 times uptake in terms of people actually using the tool. 95% preferred using our tool. I mean, there was obviously 5% that didn't, but not everyone's gonna be happy. And then from there, we also had, they saw 6,000 times ROI with our tool. Our tool in general can be more affordable than a lot of these large solutions, but the main point and the focus of why their team found it so much easier is we have ready-to-go support for suppliers, for users. So they were no longer supporting their users and their suppliers that they were dealing with and going through the process. Because when you go into a solution like this, you know, you're always going to have questions and queries, and I forgot my password. will inevitably be the most common support query that comes in. So instead of, you know, strategic sourcing users dealing with this, we instead will kind of be that first line of defense to help the users focus on things that are more crucial when focusing on sourcing. So, you know, making sure that they have the right certifications, making sure you've got the right queries, everything's been asked, all the right team members are involved. rather than, you know, this is how you get a new password, this is how you get into the solution, oh, you know, that's broken, etc. So, um, that's where we, um, started to drive a lot of change within that company. Um, and so for Imperial Brands, it's been fantastic. Um, it's been a great journey thus far. Um, and they were one of the first of many of these stories. So when we started at Market Dojo, we thought that, you know, we wanted to focus on really small procurement teams, and now we've expanded out towards, you know, a lot of global companies around the world that are using us, from, you know, Toyota, Marriott Hotels, etc. So it's been a great journey. As you can see, some of those figures are on there now, just in terms of that change in process. But, you know, phenomenal, phenomenal ROI, great usage across the business, and, you know, people using it in We've introduced so many languages because of them. So, you know, quite obscure languages to us anyway, with, you know, things like Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, all this kind of stuff. A lot of that was driven by Imperial Brands and companies like them. That's most of it for me. So what we can do is then jump on to Jesse, I believe.

Thank you very much, John. Okay, we have Jesse. Yeah, Jessie is with us. Hi, Jessie.

Hello. Hi, can you hear us? Yes, yes, yes, I can hear you. All right. Hi all, uh, I'm Jessie and thanks for inviting me for today's session. Uh, I'm from Swinburne. I'm the Director of Finance and Business Analysis, and we've been having this journey with Asker since 2021. That is how we started with ASCA. And let me give a little bit of background about what is Swinburne. Swinburne Sarawak here, this is— we are the branch campus of Swinburne Melbourne. And essentially Swinburne Sarawak, it is a joint venture between Melbourne with the state government of Sarawak, Malaysia, from Malaysia. So with that, that's how we grow. And how do we come about looking into what we call it as embracing technologies for the pain point that we have? Initially, prior to 2021, we've been looking for— we know our pain point. One of the biggest pain points that we have, it is about procure to pay at that point. And whereby it's all, all our work lots has been done manually, 100%, time-consuming. I will have 3, 4 dedicated staff every day keying in, duplicating, filing. All these manual works has been done. Okay. And not only that, all these data, in order for us to keep it, we will always keep it in Excel form so that we have historical of the data. And from there, and as usual, we are an organization, an education organization owned by the state, and we have our protocol of whereby you have to approve for those that is doing procurement, you need to have delegation of authority to approve and everything. So with this, we will actually have to manually get people to physically sign on the paperwork. So with that, that will cause a lot of bottleneck, okay? On top of that, vendors, okay, we will have vendors too whereby they— it takes a long time to onboard the vendors and so on. So this is why we decided that we need to actually— the pain point here, we need to solve it, okay, once for all. And we have been looking into various systems, okay, a number of them, and it took us actually about 1.5 to 2 years to really decide which are the systems Because essentially, Swinburne is kind of unique. Not many companies, or rather universities, actually have their procurement decentralized. So, it means to say every faculty admin unit or professional unit, they have their own team of so-called specialists to do their initial groundwork for their purchases. So because of this, it makes us a bit more unique as compared to other organizations that is decentralized. And essentially it means to say we will need this system to be able to access by the entire community of Swinburne. Okay, this is one of the difficulty of finding a system that meets our requirement because all the system out there a lot of time It is based on subscription-based, meaning to say per-use-based. But for ASCA, as in we are from finance, cost-benefit will always be one of the things to look at beside, of course, the priority initially is to look into meeting our requirement, is that they base it on subscription-based purposes. So with that, that's where we actually— Decided on ASCA, one of it is because of that it is based on sub— uh, document-based, number of document-based that we use. The more that we use, the more that we have to pay, and so on and so forth. And this is in line with what we have because we believe that when there is a growth in business, we should pay more, we will get more, we will incur more. Okay, and we are able to pay more for it. And with that, what we have at this here is that our success story whereby we are able to actually decrease the processing time 75%. Okay, so at this moment, at now, we have improved since the last time from 9 days to about 9-10 days to about 8 days. We are working towards having a turnaround of a 7 days of processing time from issuance, okay, from issuance of PR to our PO. But of course, this, when we say the number of days is not working days, is inclusive weekends, okay. Next time, next thing would be we are 3 times faster in our processing and we have cost saving of 80%. And with that, at this moment, the what I call it as the culture that actually changed the entire culture of my procurement team whereby now they no longer do clerical stuff, clerical work. Now they become what we call— I call them as a full-fledged procurement specialist whereby they actually always provide becoming a consultant. They provide what we call it as advisory compliances, governance, and to ensure everything it is transparent, okay, which is really crucial for us because we are still a government-linked government arm, so we need to comply to all this. Now, just to additionally highlight, just 2 weeks back, we just successfully actually finance— procurement finance actually successfully upgraded our ASCA to the latest one, version from version 200 to 292, I think, if I remember correctly. And with that, all these we have done it in-house. Can you imagine? Okay, that procurement, finance able to do implementation without having our IT to be involved when it comes to our ASCA upgrading and so on. So this is the extent of the changes, change management that's been done for my team, whereby they now fully own the system without having to every time relying on supports. Okay, we have our own team to support everything except for, of course, anything that is technical that we look for the Esker support team or our own IT. So with that, it really changed how we do everything from a paper-based to become now a specialist, to become a consultant, to take care of whatever that is required. And then from there, in the system, within the system, we are able to do tracking, analytical, and onboarding our vendor. Okay, onboarding our vendor. Previously, our vendor always email a lot of time, using email, all their invoices, physically send all their invoices. Now they can do it all in the system. Okay, through the escrow system. So with that, this actually enhance visibility and ensure that payment will be on time. Okay, and there will be less grievances. Not only that, I do think that for Swinburne, as you just now saw Charlie's presentation of the power couple, CFO and CPO. Okay, in Swinburne, it is very fortunate for us that from the onset of the structure, it was organized that procurement be part and parcel of finance. So in that sense, it helps to move things easier, more seamless, and standardization across and simplicity that we have done on all the processes and operational process and processes, we are able to do it within our own so-called— I would call it as my own backyard, meaning to say our own department. So it's easier than more step It— the challenge is less in that sense, in that area. We have edge over it. Okay? So, I guess this is one of the few things that I think I should be sharing also, that we will also be looking into in the next few months to actually have our vendor management and e-expense management to be wrapped up so that at the end of the day, we are looking into the entire chain of the source to pay of the escrow to help us to have centralized data of all our expenses in one area. Okay. So with this—

All right.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you, Jessie.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Jessie. This is great. Okay. Charlie, do you want to maybe we show the poll results for everyone to see?

Yes, I think can we share the poll result?

If you can comment on this, yeah. Yeah. Let's do that, yeah.

All the above.

Wow, doesn't show the number of votes.

No, you need to show the results. Okay, this is now the poll. Hold on, Danny, can you share the— just share the results, not the, the actual poll? Yeah, okay, hold on, I'm gonna figure out. Anyway, we'll have a— maybe we'll come back to that poll later. Uh, yeah, here you go, the poll is here.

Okay, all right, so looks like if I just take a quick glance Your biggest challenges, your top challenges is actually meaningful data, basically analytics. Yeah, there's 18 words there, 16 words of everything else. So honestly, it's consistent what we are seeing in the market and talking to our prospects and existing customers. These are basically the key pain points. One is I'm quite surprised, by the way, time-consuming manual data is, I think, among the lowest here in terms of vote. Maybe that gives me a picture of most of you here will have some element of automation or tools, maybe not fully automated, but at least partially automated.

Yeah.

So, yep, I think it's an industrial or the market trend this is quite in line, not something that is extra skill or difference from that perspective. Yeah, so my conclusion is, guys, you really need to consider the move into strategic sourcing, the move into, you know, having automation tools, and AI is definitely going to be a big part of the automation drive.

Okay, great. All right, so we have a lot of questions. I would like to take them now because we're running out of time. So maybe we'll get started with the questions, and maybe the first one is this one. I think it was probably for you, Charlie. So the question was, what are the key considerations for organizations in APAC when implementing S/2P solutions? compared to other regions?

Yeah, okay, I think very good questions. Firstly, it depends on your organization setup. What we are seeing from our customer base, at least a big part of them are multinationals. That means they may be present in multiple countries, not only just in APAC or across APAC, but also perhaps the headquarters, let's say, is in Europe. So that also means you will have perhaps and likelihood, multiple ERP systems. All right, so one of the considerations when we actually successful onboarding any customers, we always ask what's the key reason. So they are typically looking for solutions that can work across multiple ERPs, which is more agnostic, offers, how do I say, best practices, which our solution has embedded that. And be able to handle not only just in terms of technicality, in terms of ERP, the backend operation part of it, as well as languages. Because Asia is unique, we have almost every country have different language. So you will need to look for a solution that is perhaps really agnostic across the board, but it's also well ahead of the technology. That is something that Esker is proud of. You do not want to invest in something that is relevant today but maybe not be so relevant in the coming next 2 to 3 years with the changes in technology. So these are the key, I would say, attributes that organizations, when they look for automation, identify that. And I think Esker is very proud to say we not only offer that roadmap for your growth, but Apart from S2P, we are also in the I2C. So they really give you a seamless to really grow into one single platform where your data is centralized, where the economies of scale, you really have a very cost-effective solution as well as a very interesting ROI.

Okay, cool.

So I hope I have addressed that question from that perspective.

We have a lot more questions, so let's jump right in.

Okay.

What are the different automation considerations and outcomes when procurement reports to CFO?

Okay, next question. Different automation considerations and outcomes when procurement reports to CFO. To CFO.

Um, well, um, you want me to take that?

Can also comment on this.

I think, yeah, maybe I can give some insight because essentially I'm from finance. Okay.

Yeah, Charlie or JC, anybody?

Yeah, okay. All right. So I'll take over this question. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. When it comes to procurement reporting to CFO, I think my perspective is that basically we are— basically what we call it is the procurement is like your front end. Okay, your front end, that is where you, in order for you for data or the starting of a transaction or cost to be incurred, it will have to go through procurement. But when it comes all the way, if these 2 are of different units, by the time the CFO or the finance side know about it, it's historical data already. It's no longer— it's no longer— It becomes any rectification that you can do at that point in time it is reactive, it's no longer proactive. When these 2 units are together, you are able to proactively manage your cost and your activity and the direction of your spending. Because of that, finance has so-called— I wouldn't say— I would say a better leverage as compared to operational, Because essentially operational are more towards getting things done, operational activities. Finance side, they are looking into cost benefit. So that is how I see the difference between the two. A lot of time, I do agree that depending on the organization structure, a COO will be with procurement because essentially they will actually take care of also facilities and things like that. So it sounds like they are part of it. But if you look at it from cost perspective or value-adding perspective, in that case, yeah, it will be very logical that procurement and CFO, or rather the finance, should be working very much hand in hand. Because effectively they have the same direction, bottom line optimization activities.

Thanks, Jessie, for that. Maybe I just offer a more neutral perspective or from a solution perspective. I think the real difference is actually no impact to procurement. Your roles, your responsibility, has not changed. You are still focusing on sourcing. What this brings is to break the silo rather than— because procurement is more on the upstream, front end.

Right.

So apart from that happening, and then issues are fixed when it comes to finance, invoices are wrong, discounts are wrong, and blah blah blah. So it's more actually aligning, breaking the silo, but essentially the procurement role has not really changed. Just that now they are losing less transactional with automations, but they are more strategic. It's more value added into the organization, right? And that really brings job satisfaction. That really brings job career enhancement. Because myself, in my early days of my career, I don't like data entry, transactional, creating a PO, right? Chasing papers, routing for papers for approval. work, right? So I would say it brings more value to your work, it brings job satisfaction, right? And breaking the silos, ensuring less discrepancy and more alignment. Right, back to you, Max. Yeah, happy to see more questions.

Max is on a bit of a delay.

Yeah, yeah, if you like some of the questions that you see, yes. So let's, let's do it and let's take the next one. Maybe we will take this one.

Yeah, maybe John.

Okay, here's the next question.

John, will be for you.

How to find new suppliers?

John, I think you should take this question.

Yeah, sorry, let me just, um, anyone? So the process of sourcing and looking at, yeah.

Yeah.

Got you, got you. So the process is, in our experience, we certainly strive and push towards maybe it not being so automated because there's a lot of solutions that will offer a ready-to-go supplier directory. The issue with this is the accuracy of those is immensely difficult to maintain. So people leaving, people changing over, emails becoming void, and then it all has to be done again. So obviously, luckily with AI data scraping techniques, essentially we actually partner with specialists for it. I mean, we're listed in a few as all kinds of things from food vendors to hotel suppliers because the accuracy is not there. With Market Dojo specifically, we don't automate the process because we don't want to get it wrong. And we, you know, there's much bigger solutions than us that still get it wrong. So we have a few partners that we integrate with that essentially can provide and provision accurate data worldwide. And I think that's, that's where the direction of sourcing new suppliers is going, thanks to AI.

Yeah, I think sourcing is one component where actually you issue the RFP, getting the quotes, getting the pricing and the selection. But the process to identify, perhaps because there are already solutions that come in marketplace, and that's what John pointed out, some of the information are outdated, it's not maintained, right? And it could be very skewed to certain industry. So what we see is potentially this is something that it depends on your policy because you will have selection criteria for your policy. So one other option is to use supplier management where you can build all these criteria. You need to be a number of staff, you need to have certain certification, for example. And using supplier management, yes, that's where you onboard new supplier, be able to evaluate supplier some other element, but it's not the ready pool of suppliers that you can select, which we don't see value, neither the accuracy is in place. So there are tools, but there will be an element that is not automatically given to you that if you are in food industry, here comes the 2 suppliers that you should be working. We don't see that direction and we don't think that is the right direction.

Yeah, okay, we have time for maybe one final question. We have so many questions that we won't be able to tackle them, but there's a question about security and compliance which I just displayed on screen. Can any of you respond to this?

Maybe I should do that now. Asker has— we are using Microsoft Azure, so on that end, there's a hybrid. Microsoft Azure comes with a lot of certification and security governance. So that's one compliance that you can be assured of. On Esker's side, on our own solution that we put on Microsoft Azure using their tower to really run the offering, we have our own set of security compliance. And in the world today, we have the highest. And I'm proud to say we have never had any Cyber attack or ransomware attack today. We have a dedicated CISO team that is in compliance with all the European, and we even have customers that are vendor or supplier to the US military. Imagine the governance and security requirement from the US military is—I can tell you—you'll be surprised—it's so tight, so difficult. We pass through the evaluations. So we have ISO, we have SSAE, IASAE, and in between, when the data is actually in the cloud, it comes with what I call the transaction embedment, that without the code you can't read those data. And ultimately, those data belongs to you, our customers. Esker is just a service provider, but we provide all the firewalls, all the necessary We have passed through all certifications. Yearly, our platform is being tested by secure established international firms in terms of penetration, in terms of any gap. I would say we have one of the highest, if not the only one, that gives you this security assurance. We do have documentation to share as well. Okay, great.

This is great. Thank you, Charlie. Okay, thanks a lot. Okay, so we had a lot of questions, so what I'd like to do is to— I'd like to— we're going to copy those questions, we'll share those questions with the different speakers, and then when we send you a thank you email, we'll make sure that those questions are being answered. You guys can then have the answers to your questions about this solution. I want to— I made a promise that we will stop—

5.

The event because I know that some of you might have another event at the top of the hour. It's already 5 o'clock Hong Kong, Singapore. So I want to thank all of you again for attending today's webinar. We had a few technical glitches for sharing your experience with the solution as well. So thank you again for joining. Thanks, Charlie, for sharing your insights. And again, we look forward to see you next time. And by the way, yeah, we have a workshop that you guys can see. Yes, yeah, Charlie, go ahead.

Yeah, so feel free to reach out to us. I mean, from this, hopefully you gain valuable experience and feedback. If you'd like to know more or to explore more, feel free to sign up for our workshop. Yeah, this design exclusive for today's event, right? So I'm happy to talk to you more, right, to really explore more with all of you. Yeah, thank you.

Thanks again. Yeah, this is a special offer, just click on that sign up today button. Thanks, Eske, for partnering with us on this event. We'll follow up, we'll again share those questions and answers. And then we'll look forward again to see you at our next event. So thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you, John, and thank you everyone. Bye-bye.

Thanks all.

Thank you.