Ardent’s FinTech Influencer Series highlights innovative voices in the world of Accounts Payable (“AP”) automation. This series is the go-to spot for progressive thoughts on how technology, transformational thinking, and revolutionary ideas are changing how AP work gets done. Continuing our FinTech Influencer Series, today we are speaking with Sergio Eduardo Diaz Iniestra, IT Backoffice Director, Aeromexico, Mexico.
Ardent Partners: Welcome Sergio and thank you for spending some time with me today. Let’s get started. Please tell me about your role and responsibilities as IT Backoffice Director for Aeromexico.
Sergio Eduardo Diaz Iniestra: Aeromexico is Mexico´s flagship airline, we have destinations to North America, Centro America, South America, Asia and Europe, our passengers are our passion and cutting-edge technology is our calling.
Today I´m leading the IT Backoffice team, we are responsible for finance, human resources and normative systems support. As a part of my duties, I´m also accountable for all the projects and strategies related to corporate areas; one of the critical activities is to support the e-invoice system. In Airline industry, e-invoicing is used not only for our passengers, they are also used in other areas across our business including accounting, payroll receipts, customs information, logistics, payments and providers validation processes.
Ardent: When did Aeromexico start on its journey to eInvoicing and why? (What challenges/problems/opportunities were you looking to address by adopting eInvoicing)
SI: We started our journey 10 years ago, nowadays it´s a compulsory issue to have this process done; If we don´t deliver e-invoices to our clients or employees we can be subject to fines. We faced many challenges, but the most relevant issues were that no one had expertise on this process as it was new for everybody. We needed to adjust our different systems and make changes to our current operation. Initially, we built the processes one by one and it was definitely not perfect but that has all changed and today we are much more proactive overall in our planning and solution architecture.
As a part of e-invoice, every payment we have (income and outcome), it´s required to issue an electronic invoice for passengers, logistic clients, providers or employees. Our main challenge we had were related to our passengers e-invoice, the timing it´s crucial cause once the passenger paid, they should request his document, unfortunately not everyone asks for it.
We have two types of income invoices (individual or global), individual is used for every ticket that the client bought, but those transactions they didn´t request a document, Aeromexico should include on a global document every month were resides all the transactions, but there are some clients they asked for a document after we release the global process, so we need a credit memo or document cancelation, this is the hard part of the process.
If you are an employee or provider, we have an outcome e-invoice, we use the standard template for every invoice and we just fill the information needed for all the transactions to issue an e-invoice; for Cargo Airline or customs, we have the detail for each transaction which we are also issuing digital documents.
Ardent: What considerations did you take into account when selecting an eInvoicing solution provider?
SI: In Mexico we have the PAC (Proveedor Autorizado de Certificación / Authorized Certification Provider) so we considered the following: Time response, service level agreements, prices and the most important part, knowledge of the process as a consulting professional services.
Ardent: How involved were the AP team in this initiative? Where staff from other areas of the business (procurement, treasury, finance, line of business, suppliers, etc) involved as well?
SI: It was complicated at the beginning, e-invoice has IT components such as XML, PDF, interfaces and data systems; we defined IT as the lead area for the e-invoice and not business areas. Aeromexico created an expertise group on our shared service center and they took the ownership of the process, of course today we have built an entire model which involves all the areas; everyone was helpful in this final journey and today they are the experts.
Ardent: What results and benefits have eInvoicing provided to Aeromexico?
SI: e-Invoicing helped us to better align many processes across our business and improve our finance systems controls.
Ardent: What lessons did you learn along the way and is there anything you would do differently today?
SI: Every time you do something, in the end, you will find many better ways to improve the processes. Today we have the complete knowledge of e-invoicing that we did not possess when we started on our journey. If I had had the chance to understand the procedure that I know today, we would have designed our initial process in a different way.
Ardent: What advice would you give to other companies in the aviation industry, as well as in other industries, looking to implement eInvoicing?
SI: You should not focus just on the e-invoicing process. It´s an accounting control. If your systems are not adjusted and conciliated with your finances processes, the e-invoice won´t be worth it. Only until you consider the entire solution from the root, will you understand what it is fully capable of delivering.
Ardent: What plans do you have eInvoicing in the future?
SI: Today we are migrating our ERP (Finance, HR, Procurement, Payroll, etc) solution. That is something we think it could help us to define better controls and start from scratch. We are also working on the new e-invoice version that our government released in December and we are upgrading the data service and including the new changes they asked for us.
Ardent: Thank you for your time and best of luck on your presentation at the Exchange Summit on May 9th – 11th in Miami.
