A leading provider of datacenter campuses takes supporting its clients' technological vision seriously.
Since 2010, the company has been powering the way we live, work, and play by building and operating secure data centers that clients can rent instead of building their own. And the success of this model is evidenced by its rapid expansion in the past five years across North America, APAC, and EMEA.
When shaping the world through technology, it's essential that your business practices reflect your values to protect your reputation. For this provider, it meant revisiting AP processes across the three regions to further enhance its payment error prevention capabilities and address any blind spots, despite having clean payment data.
With FlexTrap, the company isn't just preventing duplicate payment errors. It's unlocking additional working capital to further accelerate its mission to help companies realize their technology futures without burdening its AP teams.
Rapid growth often comes with many challenges, especially for companies with decentralized teams. In the case of this provider, its AP operations across North America, APAC, and EMEA had separate methodologies for processing supplier payments on Yardi, causing blind spots that made it difficult to catch errors effectively.
Always on the lookout for innovative ways to improve operations, the company engaged FlexTecs to understand how the FlexTrap Payment Error Prevention Module could standardize and enhance AP controls across time zones without added complexity. A proof of concept (POC) was requested to determine the module's ROI.
The FlexTecs team met the challenge head-on.
A two-year historical data lookback using AI and machine learning was run to provide the company with a sample set of 10 to 20 real duplicate transactions to review. Some were known; others were not. It revealed that even mature AP environments with clean payment data are susceptible to payment error risks.
With the sample set in hand, the company quickly leveraged the insights to recover its funds and gain instant ROI, which made the investment decision an easy one.
The provider's AP teams were already adept at catching payment errors, as evidenced by FlexTrap's POC. But the approximately $5 million in potential duplicates flagged highlighted the need for an automated payment error prevention solution to proactively curtail margin erosion.
Providing AP teams with a single system of truth, while also ensuring regional flexibility, was key to the company's goals. FlexTecs leveraged Yardi as the organization's primary system and created custom FlexTrap instances with region-specific configurations for each team, allowing them to observe their unique duplicate payment trends.
In platform view of duplicate payment review dashboard in FlexTrap Payment Error Prevention Module.
Since Yardi was serving as the primary source of truth for all teams across each time zone, FlexTecs quickly onboarded and rolled out each custom instance of payment error prevention with minimal IT or AP team involvement. The team chose to start with North America before expanding to the APAC and EMEA regions.
Region-specific training and support were provided to ensure the successful adoption of the new tool in all AP departments. One of the senior AP leaders noted the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the AP team, citing FlexTrap's ease of use and intuitive features as top benefits in addition to its effectiveness.
Before FlexTrap, the AP team manually identified and corrected payment errors by collecting ERP data into a spreadsheet and using VLOOKUP to compare supplier invoices to payment data. Despite catching duplicate payment errors, the team could not catch them all.
Now, FlexTrap's AI and ML capabilities actively surface actual payment errors via a daily report. All the team has to do is review the flagged duplicates, prevent disbursement, and correct the error directly in Yardi — shifting the focus from detection to prevention.
The AP teams have been using FlexTrap for the last five months. With greater visibility into duplicate payment risk — and enhanced machine learning and filtering — the company has prevented $2 million in payment errors and significantly reduced false positives.
Manual AP work has also been dramatically reduced, freeing up teams to focus on more strategic priorities. They're even setting new goals based on benchmarks from FlexTrap's two-year lookback to identify and segment previously corrected duplicates from new ones to compare past and present performance.
With the success of the payment error prevention module, the company is now looking at implementing a POC for FlexTrap Statement Reconciliation to gain greater supplier coverage, eliminate 80% of its statement reconciliation work, and unlock additional working capital to fuel its growth.