GEVERS Group is market leader in Belgium for IP and one of the leading IP offices in France.
Focus of the case:
Our main focus in the transformation of our finance environment is supporting our business in their decisions and assisting our client facing teams in decreasing their administrative workload.
Gevers has an entrepreneurial culture giving a lot of opportunities or improvement on all levels. We believe in short and agile implementation; we adjust the project span as we go. However we never forget our main target: being a lean shared service organization that supports the digital transformation path our company has chosen.
If business goes on a digital path, finance needs to be ready upfront. For a lot of our projects or improvements we used finance or the shared services as an incubator, testing the process or the solution to later on implement and/or use the application in our business.
During the past years, we executed a number of projects and transformed our team in order to decrease the transactional work and increase the assistance and contact with our business and our clients.
- We decreased the transactional work of our data team freeing up time in their schedule to work on the projects ahead.
- We implemented a tool to help the process of credit control (iController). By focusing on automation, our credit control has now more time to have a personal contact with our clients. This acted as a proof of concept and our business now starts to use this tool to send out their invoices.
- We automated the reporting process by implementing the BI self-service tool Qlik. We have a lot of data to process. Our focus here was to provide answers in a quick and easy way but also to give some autonomy to our teams to be able to get the answers themselves. We wanted a data model that included the needed data so the time spend in creating reports could decrease significantly; the extra time could be invested in discussing and actually using the reports. This reporting is now not only used internally but is also integrated in our client portal, giving clients an insight in their portfolio.
- We are implementing a new ERP tool, Exact: off the shelf package to centralize the back office functions. The first focus is on accounting, at the same time we involved all HR processes An important factor is also process optimization, for example the validation of invoices of our agents (some 25000 incoming invoices per year).
Key success factors:
- The team: we have a very particular business which is high in managed risks and volume of administration, this combined with a sector not commonly known. Our finance team is very stable which has a vast knowledge of the sector and the company’s administration and it’s IT. Being able to count on a team that can execute and follow up these projects is the most important factor in the success of our projects.
- We implement projects in an agile way: projects are cut into different steps and implemented one step at a time making the results also more visible.
- A lot of attention goes to change management. Our business traditionally is a paper business. We had to convince a lot of people, who are used to working on paper, to digitalize. With every step in the process we explained what was in it for them and what the advantage for the finance team was. Digitalization was and will never be executed for the sake of the digitalization. All the small steps that were made in the past years pave the way to a larger digitalization which is eminent in our sector.