Our customer, a Life Sciences company in EMEA, expanded their MSP business to three new countries in the region. During the first 90 days after go-live, Pontoon’s OPEX was fully aligned with the programme team and the client to close possible outstanding implementation topics and stabilise the programme.
During this time, we discovered inefficiencies in the invoicing process related to a high volume of miscellaneous invoices (MIs). Pontoon proposed a solution that significantly reduced the number of MIs, optimised the invoicing process, and saved hiring managers’ time.
During the hypercare period, we discovered pain points in the invoicing process. The high volume of approvals, combined with the high volume of MIs, was too cumbersome to be handled effectively by the suppliers and the client’s hiring managers.
Miscellaneous invoices are additional invoices created in the VMS by the supplier for work-related expenses that are not included in workers’ compensation. For each weekly timesheet in our client’s MSP programme, suppliers had to create MIs for travel allowance and meal vouchers.
Due to local law and legislation, temporary workers were entitled to these reimbursements every week, which meant that the volume of MIs was even higher than the volume of timesheets. Due to the heavy admin workload, suppliers were making mistakes and had backlogs on invoices. As a result, the client experienced a considerable increase in approvals needed in the VMS.
Both travel allowance and meal vouchers were fixed payments, set up weekly. We knew from our MSP experience that an easy solution could be implemented in the VMS to simplify the process. Fixed amounts could be added as different pay rates on work order and timesheet levels – a very simple change with a very big impact.
We presented the change request to the client for approval. Pontoon partnered with the client and the VMS vendor to change the timesheet setup for the new EMEA countries that had been added to the programme scope. We updated training material and informed suppliers about the new way of working.
Our new time sheet setup reduced the number of miscellaneous invoices for this programme by 70% – that’s almost 60,000 fewer MIs to invoice across all countries.
The decrease in MIs reduced the need for a manual approval step by the hiring manager, which made the whole invoicing easier and less time-consuming for our client.
