With all the mergers and acquisitions, as well as organic hiring, keeping up with the current list of employees was a challenge. And since others in IT and Marketing also needed to easily see employees, trying to manage it all in our payroll system didn’t make sense. So, I built an employee module in Salesforce. With its natural strength of managing lifecycles of opportunities and clients, it was a great fit for managing employee lifecycle too. It also solved the problem of our 1099 contractors being in accounts payable in our accounting system, and temporary employees only being managed by our staffing agencies. For IT, this is vital for keeping a close eye on access to the multitude of applications that naturally come with M&A. So it is now our source of truth, and allows integrations between disparate systems.

We also implemented a Sharepoint employee portal intranet, for easier communication and centralized access to employee training and development tools.

When we were divested to become Source Advisors, we inherited all the laptops and other equipment with no receipts. And just had hodgepodge spreadsheets and word documents, which had been sufficient for managing assets, prior to the carve out. These problems started compounding as we acquired other companies. So we desperately needed a true working inventory system that IT could use operationally. As a result, I implemented an asset management system, to functionally manage our important assets containing data, who they are assigned to, and where they were physically located. The ability to check equipment in and out was a game changer. And improved our ability to smoothly manage IT assets in an organized manner. We also created welcome kits so that new employees starting remotely would have a warm welcome to our organization when they received their equipment.

Vendor contracts were another area that needed a lot of attention. We had to wind down and transition contracts from the divestiture. Establish new contracts while looking like a brand new company, due to the carve out. Co-term and combine various contracts from the mergers and acquisitions. And implement new contracts to replace the web retail buying that we had been doing. And to top that off, each of these usually had a business process and employee aspect to deal with as well - each one was a “project”. There was a lot to be done in a short amount of time to get things to a level steady state.

While working through the continuous improvement for this, I created a Vendor Contract Module in Salesforce. Most off the shelf solutions were too complex, had long drawn out implementations, or just weren’t quite a good fit for our use case. By building a simple app in Salesforce, we could manage contract lifecycle, as well as leveraging CRM to keep track of the vendor companies and contacts, all in one place.

Sometimes it is the simple things that make the most difference. As we’ve grown, instead of having a flat accounting department structure, the org hierarchy was developing. So we needed to start splitting our Accounts Payable from Accounts Receivable, along with bring in a CFO and developing a Finance role and analytics. So one thing we did is create shared email mailboxes for each group. And get correspondence out of individual mailboxes. Then implementing an expense tool called Fyle is helping to manage corporate card expenses and purchases, along with pass through expenses, with just general business expenses.

Prior to the divestiture, accounting was deeply siloed from the rest of the organization. So standing up our own systems, allowed us to re-imagine how the handoff from sales to our service lines and accounting departments happened. As we went through mergers and acquisitions, the ad how and siloed processes were creating a lot of unnecessary complication. So we have been working towards Accounts Receivable (AR) automations with a customer payment portal using Versapay. But selling highly specialized high value consulting meant we need to move beyond basic invoice reminders, toward dunning and personalized email touches. Beyond accounting, we have also been building out pre-sales and post-sales customer service and smooth handoffs to our service departments. It is still a work in progress, but each step is moving us in the right direction.

AI/ML/RPA/Augmented Reality is offering a lot of opportunities for innovation, as well as struggles from a security perspective. We have been doing a pilot programs with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). And we are discovering ways it can help the business. But we are also seeing an uptick in volume and sophistication in security threats. Fortunately, the latest security tools have AI built in, too. This helps combat the bad guys, who are trying to use it to try and do bad things.