The inaugural AP Honors Ceremony celebrated the accounts payable profession and recognized excellence in the field. During the ceremony, Ardent Partners presented awards for outstanding performance and execution in the last year — “The AP Honors” — to a variety of high achievers including Accounts Payable and P2P leaders and teams, as well as ePayables (AP Automation) solution providers and other experts.
Let’s look at the Best Team Performance Award/AP Team of the Year winner.
Best Team Performance Award/AP Team of the Year: This award is presented to the AP department that has excelled across the full scope of the ePayables Framework (invoice receipt, approval, and payment) to make a significant impact on overall enterprise results.
Winner: Teekay
Company: The world’s leading marine services company. It operates in the tanker space through Teekay Tankers Ltd (Singapore) and crewing/technical management of Australian government vessels by way of Teekay Australia. The company operates in 11 offices across 8 countries (Australia, Bermuda, Canada, India, Philippines, Singapore, United Kingdom, and United States).
Employees: Total employees are 2,400 (2,000 seafarers and 400 shore staff). The AP team consists of 13 employees (of a total of 66) who are based in Manila.
Teekay AP Team: Jan Vincent T. Gabriel (Manager, Accounts Payable); Lincoln Anonuevo (Lead, Accounts Payable); Maria Joy Magpantay (Senior Accounts Payable Specialist); Angela Emalada (Senior Accounts Payable Specialist; Jamie Claire Magnayon (Accounts Payable Specialist II).
Global, AP Shared Services Team
As a centralized AP function based in Manila, Philippines, Jan Vincent T. Gabriel, manager, accounts payable for Teekay, credits the success of the department to its people. In 2009, Teekay launched a globalization initiative and transitioned business services to Manila — centralizing the AP function and making it the company’s first shared services operation.
Gabriel says having the full scope of the accounts payable function enabled the team to develop key competencies in the areas of tax (handling different tax scenarios per country), audit compliance, and process documentation. “AP was Teekay’s introduction to shared services and the vote of confidence needed by the organization to embrace globalization and further expand the business services segment,” he says.
The AP team processed 14-15K invoices per month before the 2020/2021 divestment of Teekay’s Offshore and Gas business. Following the divestiture, the volume of processed monthly invoices was 3,500 covering all operations (PO invoices, non-PO invoices, expense reports, voyage, and overhead/office costs).
Over the last year, Gabriel and his team launched several AP initiatives cross-functionally, adding profitability and value to Teekay’s business operations. The following highlights a few of those innovative programs.
P2P Dashboard Delivers Cross-Functional Metrics
Known for its solid internal AP metrics measuring timelines (turnaround time) and quality improvement (errors), Gabriel and his team recognized an external opportunity after collaborating with Teekay’s procurement and treasury teams.
A lack of shared metrics benefiting stakeholders throughout the P2P chain led to the development (alongside the financial systems team) of a P2P dashboard. The tool was designed for visualization into the company’s P2P metrics in three key areas: Receipt to Submission (R2S), Submission to Approve (S2A), and Approve to Pay (A2P).
“The dashboard identified our fastest/slowest approvers which helped drive our approval turnaround time. It also produced data for our top suppliers and payment performance,” Gabriel explained.
“Through this initiative, we accomplished several things, increased collaboration across the P2P chain, key insights on what may be causing bottlenecks in the process, and enablement of informed decisions in the areas of supplier and cash management alongside our procurement and treasury teams.”
Invoice Automation a Steppingstone to Teekay Digitization
The AP team processes 3,500 invoices per month, of which, PO invoices account for half of the total invoice volume. When Teekay rolled out its digitization initiatives, it was AP that launched the first and largest automation project for the company — targeting invoice processing. Gabriel said automation brought significant efficiency, reducing invoice processing time from 1-2 days to less than 24 hours.
The daily efficiencies from automation also paid dividends during the holidays. Typically, it required the team as much as two weeks to process invoices following a long holiday. Automation shortened that timeframe to 3-5 days. The hours and days earned back enabled Gabriel and his team to execute more value-added tasks, paving the way for new strategic projects.
“The AP automation was the organization’s ‘buy-in’ with other departments to embrace the digital era as it has proven that automation ideas significantly improve our performance. Being the first automation project also exposed the team to its initial limitations, allowing the team to expand its knowledge in troubleshooting and learning a few useful technical maneuvers along the way,” Gabriel said.
Banking Workflow Adds Fortification Against Fraud
Only a few short years ago, the AP team strictly relied upon a document format (letterhead, in PDF format, and signed by a finance representative) for bank detail verification. However, growing and more sophisticated cybersecurity threats led to ongoing check-ins with Teekay’s Risk, Audit, and Compliance (RAC) team that determined existing controls may be insufficient against hackers and fraud.
“As such, we designed the Bank Details Workflow, which is a SharePoint workflow that routes the documents to our Vendor Management team who perform necessary phone verification,” Gabriel noted.
“With this additional layer of verification, we coordinate with an existing contact at the supplier who can verify the bank details received by the AP team. Since rolling out this initiative, we have prevented at least three fraud attempts and have recorded zero audit findings during the annual review by RAC.”
The AP team also collaborated with the RAC team to draft a guide questionnaire for use by the Vendor Management team to help facilitate a streamlined verification process. Gabriel’s team shares recent findings and holds training sessions on identifying red flags and maintaining a high sense of awareness with fraud attempts.
Behind Every Successful Department Is a Talented Team
All of these accomplishments, said Gabriel, come back to the people. The focus on people development within AP and Teekay has always been its main ingredient for success. Every learning is shared with each member of the team. Mentoring and coaching are staples of the culture. And there is support for new ideas and initiatives.
“We are proud that even team members who ventured out of Teekay found success because of the experience they gained while with the organization,” Gabriel said. “It also never ceases to amaze me that we have a steady roster of leaders who always step up and perform whenever their number is called.
“Our journey is not an overnight success, but rather a collection of years of hard work that simply manifested through the efforts of our people.”
