Effective Vendor Management by Mynd Solutions

Mynd understands that while making payments efficiently, cost-effectively and accurately are pivotal to every well-managed account payables function in the organization; simultaneously Supplier and Vendor’s satisfaction is measured by the ease of process offered in handling invoices and turnaround time for payment. Keeping the above concept in mind, our accounts payable service offering aims at striking a balance between process optimization and supplier satisfaction.

Organizations that have been in business operations for some duration of time are often completely occupied with several service providers and vendors facilitating their functions. Of the many vendors that service Global companies, some might be strategic however the majority are largely utilizing for executing routing tasks only. 

Irrespective of the number of vendors being on a lower side or even in larger organizations having multiple vendors numbering in the hundreds; the entire process of managing vendors is essentially a laborious and costly affair. The time-consuming process of managing multiple vendors leads to wastage of manpower resources, which might have been allocated to more strategically useful processes. 

A huge amount of leadership time and energy is wasted in the quest to manage multiple providers, thus deviating the attention from core focus areas including- management of overall infrastructure and operations of the organization. It is a well-known fact that as the vendors associated with a firm increase, in the same order the challenges associated with managing them grow. 

Mis-management often leads to Loss in Value Chain. Ill-managed vendor  relationships  create  increased expenses along with inadequacies in operations. The primary reasons for loss in value chain due to mis-managed vendors include:

• The vendor’s service delivery is effected over some time and is not as per customer’s needs
• No competition between vendors
• There is a lack of partnership for innovation across the different provider types and relationships

Improving Profitability with Mynd's Finance & Accounting Services..

Improve your bottom line with Mynd’s finance and accounting outsourcing solutions, built to achieve high-performance business results

Ongoing pressures to optimize business performance have prompted many finance executives to look for new approaches, including outsourcing finance & accounting functions of the organization. Financial organizations worldwide are facing the impact of higher volatility, uncertain business as well as regulatory and socio-political environments putting pressure on them to make their bottom-line more predictable and sustainable. Chief Financial Officers (CFO) of leading organizations are leveraging finance and accounting outsourcing as a strategy to change their operating models.

Mynd integrates domain expertise, global delivery network and technology solutions to assist clients in identifying, transitioning, transforming, executing and continuously adding value to finance and accounts outsourcing processes through a low-cost BusinessProcess Outsourcing (BPO) services model; without compromising on quality and compliance. We believe in delivering the right information at the right time! We provide our clients managed Finance and Accounting Outsourcing Services at the lowest possible costs so that they can focus on their core business activities while saving a significant amount of overhead costs as well. We are offering Accounting Outsourcing Services globally and provide tailor-made solutions to our clients.

Mynd Solutions provides best solutions for outsourcing your Finance& Accounts outsourcing requirements. The services offered aims to meet client's business objectives as well as cost-optimization goals. We deal with global clients and provide customized solutions for many industries namely Telecom, Retail and e-Commerce, BFSI, Infrastructure, Healthcare etc. Reduction in operational costs has helped our clients' boost their business. We provide great control over finances, which in turn enhance profits of the company.

HR Process Outsourcing and Your Organization..

Business Process Outsourcing

HR Outsourcing

HR is a strategic business function in most organizations and hence outsourcing the processes related to it is a task that requires ample thought and decision. There are several concerns that most HR decision-makers normally have with regards to confidentiality of employee information, loss of control over their internal resources and knowledge also the quality of work delivered remains a major concern.

Several organizations in the employee range of 1,000-5000 are outsourcing their Human Resource processes as a cost-control strategy. HR is primarily a non-profitable cost centre in the organization, and hence qualifies itself as the best area to be outsourced to a third party. More and more companies are now subcontracting the backend HR functions including compensation and benefits administration, recruitments, expense management, payroll and statutory compliances.

As per market statistics, HR is one of the most aggressively growing segments in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market. The primary driving factors behind the increasing adoption of HRO (for not just the redundant backend tasks but even for performance management, talent management, training etc.)-

Efficiency Enhancement: Efficiency is undoubtedly a primary driver in the outsourcing business. Mostly, efficiency depends upon the outsourcing service provider’s capability to enable technology additions to the usual HR platforms and processes.

Cost Benefits: Majority of the outsourcing decisions are intended at direct cost benefits to the company. However, one needs to know that solely basing an outsourcing decision on price benefits does not guarantee success.

Manpower Outsourcing_ A Review

Merits of manpower outsourcing

Manpower outsourcing is required to meet the ever growing demand of the corporate for flexibility of work force, improvement in productivity, cost reduction, statutory compliance and faster mobilization & demobilization of people. Mynd offers the absolute solution that covers almost every aspect of HR needs right from recruitment to exit modalities. Outsourcing is a standout amongst the most productive approaches to save expense.

Why opt for Contractual Staffing?

In outsourcing, an outer firm or organization carries on administration or improvement of an item for an alternate firm. The thought began when organizations were hesitant to contract new workers for transient occupations. Absence of gifted laborers is an alternate situation when outsourcing labor requirements is needed. Numerous IT firms, now and again, oblige individuals well- versed in particular engineering, which they may not, generally, have in their asset pool. In such cases, they can contract gifted experts additionally called contract staffing specialists to finish their assignments.

Manpower Outsourcing Procedure

When an organization selects contract staffing specialists, they search for suitable vendors. Vendors blanket the process that they will take after to finish the venture, current monetary position of the organization, specialized capacity of its workers, and all the data, which can help win over the trust of the organization.

A percentage of the profits of outsourcing are recorded underneath: 

·                     First and unequivocally the most essential perspective is expense decrease of improvement of by and large extend.

·                     Hiring labor from an outsource organization who has great and learned talented experts in the field, can enhance nature of the item.

·                     Lowering weight on HR bureau of employing and upholding gifted experts.

·                     Companies can put more stress on planning and examination of an item instead of putting exertion on gathering due dates. 

Organizations today contend to maintain their customers but give a quality administration. The main way they can survive is by lessening their running expense. IT is one of the best and most proficient approaches to decrease the expense of improvement of a venture/

Payroll Outsourcing Benefits

THE IMPORTANCE OF PAYROLL OUTSOURCING FOR CONTEMPORARY BUSINESSES

Business owners have to invariably deal with the complexities that exist around managing the payroll for their employees. This tedious task is essentially considered a futile active reluctant to spend their precious time and resources for managing the same. Mynd Solutions has offered outsourcing benefits to its clients for more than a decade now. The payroll specialist teams at Mynd, help businesses deal with this task of payroll processing in an efficient manner.

There are many good reasons to outsource your payroll such as-

     Cost-efficiency is a major reason to opt for outsourcing of payroll operations. In-house payroll services are often quite a money draining activity, especially for SME’s. Saving money wherever possible is crucial for all businesses and outsourcing payroll, helps substantially reduce this major avoidable expenditure.

2  Payroll Outsourcing enables companies to free up vital management time. Hence, the leadership and operations teams are available to handle other crucial strategic decision tasks instead of back end administrative operations. Mynd’s experienced Payroll Service teams have received appreciation of clients through a well-earned expertise and a commitment to personalized service, allowing you that free time to apply to other areas of your business.

 Mynd payroll can provide you peace of mind by handling everything in an accurate and timely manner. With advanced technology and experience that Mynd offers, efficient payroll functioning is just a phone call away.

A Case Study on Prevention of Duplicate Claims and Related Automation Undertaken for Enhanced Reconciliation Processes

The Client:

The customer is the world’s largest telecom tower Company, which is enabling communications revolution into a significant new phase. The client is an independently managed Company offering passive infrastructure services to all telecom operators and other wireless services providers such as broadband service providers. Incorporated in November 2007, our customer offers passive infrastructure services to telecom service providers.

The client was incorporated with an objective to provide shared telecom infrastructure to telecom operators on a non-discriminatory basis. The client is also committed to innovation for the enhancement of operational efficiencies to provide substantial cost savings for its customers.

Preventive Care Analysis (PCA)

Mynd is well- known for its vigilant approach in picking duplicate claims. This is our USP and separates us from competition, due to direct savings given to client.

One of the teams in this particular SHARED SERVICE CENTER (SSC) project is engaged in the process of Preventive Care Analysis (PCA) for reconciling the invoices of our esteemed client

The team follows the below Phases (Steps) under PCA:

• Ø  Identification of Probable Duplicate Invoices  

Alerts-

·         Invoice Date, before 1 year from date of punching.

·         Service Period, before 1 year from date of punching

• Ø  Application of audit checks on the invoices identified

Investigate-

·         Search similar invoice No. in Oracle in same Vendor using “%” sign.

·         Check descriptions for invoices booked near to service period

·         Check site ID booking for similar services for other invoices booked

• Ø  Intimation to Client

Communicate-

·         Any probable duplicity noted during audit is communicated to client in specified format, with detailed reasons of doubt.

The Achievements of Mynd at a glance due to Preventive Care Analysis offered to Client

PCA Outcomes
Status	No of Cases	Savings to Client
Confirmed Savings	42	INR 5.11 Million
Probable Duplicity Reported	89	INR 11.39 Million
Under Investigation	39	INR 5.25 Million

Automated Macro for BRS

The other team in this SSC project has introduced Automated Macro for BRS Preparation, thereby reducing the dependency on Manual Labor, improving efficiency as well as decreasing human errors. The journey from Manual to Automated, illustrated below with detailed steps-

Detailed Laborious Steps of Manual BRS Preparation Prior to Automation (Total 43 steps of manual copy, paste and deletion of data)

·         1.) Consolidating GL reports (Main Bank & Cash clearing GL)

·         2.) Calculating Net Amount (Subtracting Credit amounts from Debit)

·         3.) Creating unique combination of transactions (Concatenating GL date, Transaction No. & Net Amount)

·         4-5.) Identifying new transactions to consider (applying “vlookup” with previous consolidated data & Selecting # N/A cases)

·         6.) Deselecting System cleared transactions ( Filtering out “Reconciled Payments”)

·         7-16.) Plotting transactions into relevant Open Annexures             (total 10 times copy & paste of data )

·         17-26. ) Plotting transactions from Bank statement into relevant open Annexures (total 10 times copy & paste of data )

·         27-30.) Applying vlookup between annexures to find transactions to be knocked off in BRS.

( Annexure I & II, I & IV, III & IV, II&III)

·         31-38.) Copying the knocked off transactions from Open Annexures to Knocked off  Annexures (Total 8 times copying of data from Open Annexures to knocked off annexures)

·         39-43.) Deleting the transactions knocked off from Open Annexures ( total 4 times row deletion)

Detailed Steps of Automated Macro (Total 16 steps of manual copy, paste and deletion of data)

·         1.) Consolidating GL reports (Main Bank & Cash clearing GL)

·         2.) Clicking  “GL Dump Work”

·         3.) Clicking  “GL Data Plot”

·         4.) Clicking  “SOA Plot”

·         5.) Clicking  “KO I&II”

·         6.) Clicking  “KO Data Plot I&II”

·         7.) Clicking  “KO I&IV”

·         8.) Clicking  “KO Data Plot I&IV”

·         9-10.) Applying vlookup between annexures to find        transactions to be knocked off in BRS. (Annexure III & IV, II & III)

·         11-14.) Copying the knocked off transactions from Open Annexures to Knocked off  Annexures ( total 4 times copying of data from Open Annexures to knocked off annexures)

·         15-16.) Deleting the transactions knocked off from Open Annexures ( total 2 times row deletion)

Subsequent to the introduction of Automation Macro, Mynd helped its customer to achieve the below benefits-

Benefits of BRS ( Automation Macro):

·         Error free deliveries due to reduced human efforts

·         Continuous improvement in service delivery

·         Timely deliveries

·         Value added deliveries

Achievements of BRS ( Automation Macro) :

·         Successful Automation-Out of total 226 BRSs total 120 recons covered under automation.

·         Successful Compliance-Of stiff SLAs under BRS.

·         Reduced Human Efforts-Reduced pressure on Mynd team members

·         Improved and Reliable Quality of Work-Quality assurance done for deliveries under BRS.

·         Time Saving in Processes-Almost 40% of time saving done for any particular activity.

Cash Management Process Automation by Mynd Solutions

The Background

Mynd Solutions Finance and Accounting (F&A) Outsourcing has pioneered finance and accounting solutions by integrating domain expertise, global delivery network and technology solutions. Mynd assists in identifying, transitioning, transforming, executing and continuously adding value to finance and accounts processes through a low-cost Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services model, without compromising on quality and compliance. We believe in delivering the right information at the right time.

Mynd operates in the following Major areas in Retail Segment

·         DSR Audit & Cash Pick up

·         Store/ Warehouse process Audit

·         Inventory Audit

·         Cash Management

Mynd has provided exceptional service delivery for several retail clients in the past few years in different service domains. Clients include leading Indian and Global brands in Apparel, Restaurant and Fast Food Chain, Online retail Industries etc.

Petty Cash Process

The Client:

The client is an Indian e-commerce company, founded in 2007, and headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka. It is considered as the e-commerce company that made online shopping popular in India. This popular Indian online retailer offers books, apparels, fashion wear, accessories, electronics, and appliances among many other offerings.

 Cash Management Process Undertaken by Mynd for Client:

Mynd Solutions started Cash management process for the above client in May 2012. In this assignment, Mynd is processing & managing their petty cash expense & related Imprest management across all delivery hubs in India. We started this journey with 70 hubs in May-12 and are currently handling 200 + Hubs.

   What’s Unique About this Assignment?

Ø  Managing the Cash Processes for the largest e-commerce Company in India.

Ø  First-ever e-commerce client of Mynd Solutions

Ø  Project was initiated in a very short span of time.

Ø  Dynamic nature of client requirements

Ø  High volumes of cash covered in the assignment

Initial Challenges witnessed during this project:

Ø  Several software changes were made as per client’s exclusive requirements

Ø  Automations had to be introduced in many areas

Ø  Software Training was to be provided to Pan India Hub Managers

Ø  Streamlining client’s conveyance expense was a major challenge, which is 80 % of total hub expenses

Normal SLA Delivery Provided to Client:

Ø  Processing expense vouchers within 7 working days with 100 % accuracy.

Ø  Daily MIS reporting on volume of vouchers created by hubs, processed by Mynd team, pending for approval at different levels along with the ageing of pending vouchers.

Ø  Weekly MIS reporting & analysis on different expenses.

Ø  Timely updation of portal which includes creation of new hubs, cash feeding to hubs & addition / edition of users 

Ø  Providing Journal Voucher of all approved expenses & provisions in the desired format for uploading in their Oracle software as month end reporting

Ø  Generation of Petty cash Certificate by Monthly

Ø  Software Training to Hub In charge.

Ø  Helpdesk & Query Resolution

The Extra Mile Efforts made by Mynd Retail Accounting Team to Improve Service Delivery:

Ø  Understanding the nature of the client’s business

Ø  Spending time in the delivery hubs to understand the ground level activities and Challenges

Ø  Identifying the areas where automation may be introduced

Ø  Identifying the leakage points

Process Automation and Benefits

Several improvements & automation features have been introduced in the Petty Cash process by Mynd, since the beginning. The major automation features introduced by the Mynd team include-

Ø  Weekly Expenses reports: We implemented various real time automated reports in the software which ultimately reduced manpower efforts & chances of any errors.

Ø  System validation & supporting attachment : We made expense supporting’s attachment mandatory in the software so that processing team is not dependent on hard copies to process the voucher & accordingly processing time may be reduced.

Ø  New Conveyance Screen: We introduced a new voucher screen for biker’s conveyance expense wherein the users mention opening & closing kilometers of the bikers & rest all conveyance calculation is done by the software on the basis of per K.M. rate (already fixed in the software). This automation simplified the Hub Manager’s task, as they don’t have to prepare manual excel file. It also helped Mynd team to process the voucher quickly with enhanced control.     

Benefits Derived from Process Improvement:

Ø  Faster processing of Claims:  Through regular MIS compilation, process set up & Client support, Mynd was able to reduce the cycle time by 10 days.

Ø  Automation established in:-

·         Conveyance Claim Process

·         Real time reporting

·         System Validations

Ø  Improved Controls in Place: Controls have increased because decision makers can take decision quickly by seeing real-time reports online

Ø  Reduction of working capital: It also helped the client to reduce their working capital lying within the hubs in the form of Imprest balance in all hubs.

Ø  No follow up with Hubs for Claims hardcopies: Our process improvement & automation reduced dependency on hard copies of the vouchers and their receipt.

Ø  Real time cash balance : Our process provided online tool to user to view individual / consolidated petty cash balance online in real time, so that decisions on further cash feeding can be taken effectively & quickly

Client Rewards Mynd’s Efforts

After successful implementation & running of petty cash process for over 1 & ½ years we have been awarded many more projects by this esteemed client.  The summary of the projects won by Mynd are enumerated below-

Ø  One time projects

–        Data conversion from Navision to Tally under letsbuy.

–        Transporter POD’s Verification project

Ø  Regular projects

–        Hub Audits

–        Warehouse  Process Quality Audit

–        Inventory Verifications

–        Vendor Reconciliation

–        AR Reconciliation

–        Bank Reconciliation

–        Training ( Under Implementation)