Breaking Barriers: How Digital Transformation is Reshaping Spend Management with Dermalogica

Change management is hard. And digital transformation can be overwhelming. So being tasked with the job of guiding employees through the changes digital transformation brings might feel nothing short of intimidating. But with a commitment to meeting your employees where they are and a game plan that considers the current state of your T&E systems and processes and maps to the desired end state, the change can be seamless.

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Jenny Chen, Senior Accountant at Dermalogica, and Jeanne Dion, Vice President of the Value Experience Team at SAP Concur, discuss Dermalogica’s recent digital transformation, the smart approach the company took to change management, and why intentionally taking a long-term view in creating scalable systems and processes was crucial to Dermalogica’s success.

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Read the transcript from this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast below:

Jeanne Dion:

Welcome to the SAP Concur Conversations Podcast. Each episode, we sit down with industry experts, visionaries and leaders as they share what it takes to build forward-thinking spend and travel programs. Our goal is to get you thinking differently about how your organisation spends money. I'm your host, Jeanne Dion, and I'm the Vice President on the value experience team here at SAP Concur. My team works with customers to bring positive business outcomes based on data driven insights. And today, I am joined by Jenny Chen of Dermalogica. Dermalogica has undergone a very impressive digital transformation over the past few years and Jenny has been at the helm of that change management process. She's been very intentionally creating scalable systems and processes that can grow with the company, taking a real long-term view that will help the company scale to its desired future state, while very masterfully guiding employees through the transition.

So today, Jenny and I are going to talk about that journey. But Jenny, first before we get started, would you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Jenny Chen:

Hi, Jeanne. Hi, everyone. My name is Jenny Chen and I work for Dermalogica down in Australia. So I've been in the company for five years now I believe, and it was previously a five person company down in Australia, which has now grown to 150 strong. So you can obviously imagine the internal controls and processes which once worked needed improvement and efficiency upgrades. And we were just trying to find a good mix of what we needed out of a small to medium enterprise versus a corporate structure. And we were taken over by a tiny little organisation called Unilever. They probably own everything in your kitchen and your bathroom, probably your fridge, I'm not too sure about that one. And that also propelled the growth that we see today. So I'm very happy to be invited to talk to you all about how we had implemented controls with the SAP Concur platforms. We had implemented I think four, four of the platforms for SAP Concur. We won an award. Actually, we won a couple of awards for the travel platform, the expense platform, and the purchase request and invoice platform.

Jeanne Dion:

I'm glad you mentioned that because I want to get to that digital piece. You said something really interesting to me in a previous conversation. You all won that SMB Digital Innovation award in 2022, and you were also honorable mention for The Best Run in 2022.

Jenny Chen:

That's correct.

Jeanne Dion:

So I want you to tell me what your coworkers said when you told them you won those awards.

Jenny Chen:

That's a funny conversation, actually. Most of our stakeholders actually asked me, "Jen, why did we win the Innovations Award? I don't see the innovation that you're talking about that we're awarded for. What efficiencies? What controls? I don't understand." And for me, that was the greatest compliment because it not only envisioned what I wanted for my stakeholders for the enterprise, I wanted to make sure that everyone in our company was on the same track that it didn't disrupt their workflow, that efficiencies were seamless, that they didn't see the effects of trying to create these efficiencies and improvements in our organisation. So that was a big win I think personally for me and also for the company, very ironically. That's how I saw that.

Jeanne Dion:

But I think it talks really to your unorthodox way of doing this type of work and bringing innovation to your organisation. And you have a really interesting view about innovation, that innovation really isn't the problem. It's the rate of change and the message that comes with it, which is really hard to control when you have a lot of change management happening. So I'm just wondering. As you looked at this problem of needing to innovate what you were doing, and I think this applies to any company regardless of the size, how did you approach this? What was it that you did that got them to realize this really isn't a big deal in my everyday life, but it was enormous for the corporation and how you operate?

Jenny Chen:

Well, first off, we never really saw it as an innovation project or a transition project. We wanted to make an impact without annoying or disrupting workflow in organization. So when I approach this certain project, I don't go to my stakeholders and say, "Well, this is what's going to happen in week one, in the first month, within the first three months." I would approach them with the aspect of, okay, so let's sit down and have a conversation. And why don't you tell me what is your pain point in your particular area? And make sure I talk to not just the people in management, but the people on the stomping grounds too, which is I think a very crucial aspect in any project.

I guarantee you, if you stay by the water cooler, if you do the coffee rounds with people, you will get a more descriptive, more better insight into what needs to be improved, where efficiencies should lie, and I don't follow trends, Jeanne. So how I approached it, I looked at specifically what the company values were. I looked at specifically what kind of stakeholders I'm working with, predominantly where their weaknesses and strengths were, and I probably planned the entire platform around what they could handle and progressively infused change. So by the end of this one year mark, or by the end of the two year or six month mark regardless, they would all be on the same page. And I made sure that I made the time to sit with them one on one, or as a team, or create the workshops that were the pain points for a specific departments.

And we didn't just stop there. We continuously made sure that was a routine lesson in our organisation. And by the time we won that Innovations Award, they had no idea what had happened. They just knew that they had changed in the last five years and it was a gradual, seamless procession in our organization.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. So it sounds like you did a lot of focus with your evangelists, those people who were going to pull it forward. Right?

Jenny Chen:

Correct.

Jeanne Dion:

You did a lot with a focus on the squeaky wheels as well, those laggards, those naysayers, to kind of bring them along and to get that feedback so you could head off some of the negativity upfront. Would you say that was kind of how you worked this entire process? And I don't want to call it a project because I know you don't call it a project.

Jenny Chen:

No. We didn't have a name for it. We just said, "We're going to look at some efficiencies, look at some controls." We didn't want to scare our stakeholders, Jeanne. So we wanted to make sure they were at ease. I did mention to you, lots of flowers and chocolates were involved too. Who can complain when their mouth is full of chocolates. Right?

Jeanne Dion:

That's right.

Jenny Chen:

We made sure that we consistently went into the system and pulled out specific trends that we saw. So if we knew that we had specific people that usually would create expenses on a weekly basis and had now dropped to one or two a month, we would reach out and go, "Hey, is there something wrong? Do you need some extra help in particular areas? Why don't we have a one on one and sit down to see if we can make this process easier for you?" Because sometimes people don't want to bother or they just don't have the time to try and find those pain points at that particular moment. So we do this on a monthly basis, we made sure everybody was upskilled in our organisation, so that no one was left behind consistently.

Jeanne Dion:

That's an amazing way to do it and I think it becomes ... I think your success shows how that concentration really helps manage that change and helps people understand you have changed a few things, but you haven't changed everything in the world. The world still needs the work that you're doing, and we may have changed a few of the tools in the toolbox, but the whole world didn't change.

Jenny Chen:

That's correct. I'll give you an example. So we had some issues with our expense platform, and what they were previously doing with their expense platform was they would complete 20 fields in a platform and they would upload their receipt. So instead of taking that process away from them and giving them a new one, we basically said, "Hey, it's the same process. We've just cut down the number of fields you need to populate," which is great. We streamlined it so that maybe eight out of the 10 fields are already auto-populated because we know what division you're in. We know what channel you're in. And if you go and upload the receipt, which was one of the controls that we wanted, we wanted a receipt submission, if you upload that, it makes it even better because it auto-populates everything for you.

So all you need to do is press submit, so we didn't take the process away from users, we just tried to follow the same course, but improve the actual process of the user interface. On the backend side, that was where all the magic was. That was 100% magic because we no longer had to manually key in transactions. We basically made sure the API was integrated into our ARP system, so all a finance officer had to do now was walk into the office, log in, and do an eyeball check, and post. So the beauty of what we had done for these platforms and controls was create an end to end solution instead of automating and creating automation for one process in finance than the entire solution that we were looking for.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. And we keep talking about entire solution. I do want to come back to the efficiency, but you've done something that's really unusual and a little different than a lot of other customers do. You actually started with part of the platform that most customers do last, and that was the implementation of the invoice tools first. So can you tell me a little bit around why you went with that first, and how that helped pave the way for what came after it with the T and E solutions?

Jenny Chen:

Okay. Well, we started off with the purchase request invoice system because we're crazy. We had a lot of control issues around the purchase request and invoice procedures as it was. As you all know with small organisations, it's quite straightforward. You would have a top down approval. There would be a dozen or so vendors that you had to pay off. So it's very easy to streamline that. But when it gets to triple digits in an organisation, and different departments, it's a lot harder to track your approval. And we did have one poor bugger who would go and print out all the purchase orders at the end of the week and print out all the invoices that were received at the end of the week and manually match them.

So it wasn't the greatest process, but it was a process that was grandfathered down. And we found that was probably not the most efficient way of hiring someone, nor was it the most easiest way for someone. There's a lot of errors and manually keying in and manually banking and processing payment for these vendors went from 10 invoices a week to 50 or 80, so it was a very voluminous amount, so we knew that we needed something, just something, because it was wasting our human resource time to hire someone and create these payments.

When we looked into the purchase request and invoice system, I already had an idea what I wanted. But I not only wanted finance automation on the back office side, I wanted accountability from the get go of the creation of the request. So that's what we started off, we just started off looking at the policy first. Do we need to change the policy of how purchase requests and orders are actioned and how they are approved? Yes, we did. Once those policies were in order, we slowly started to infuse those changes. We made sure that the SAP Concur solution could basically provide the transparency, the order trail, and accountability, not just from top to bottom, but from bottom to top.

 So not only were the request users able to track their own requests, we gave, I think we gave the approvers five days to approve. If they didn't, it jumped to the approver's approver. We gave that approver five days, which ultimately jumped to the general manager. And the general manager could actually track this entire process down to the date of origination for these requests. So as I said, approval accountability from top to bottom and bottom to top. That's what we wanted the most out of this process.

On the finance side, we made sure that one, the invoices and purchase orders were automatically mapped. There was no poor bugger in our office trying to manually map these. We also wanted a controls check to make sure if the purchase order did not align with that invoice, it will go through a human eyeball check, and ultimately a final round of the invoice approval. So a three-way approval flow was the ultimate goal for finance, but we made sure an end to end solution was done for our process for purchase order invoice platforms.

Jeanne Dion:

Wow. So now that you have that in place, how did that pave the way for you to be able to then just pull in the travel and expense side of the house to move that through? Did it make it easier because you had more time to work on it, or did it make it easier because you had already gone through some of the pain points that you would have during an implementation? How did that help you kind of smooth the path for T&E?

Jenny Chen:

Well, because we were able to create such efficiencies in the purchase request invoice platform, the stakeholders could actually see an improvement in payment turnarounds. They could see what they were actually doing, so the accountability of the process for any operational procedures now was intact. In order to create the expense and travel platform, we basically took similarities in the policies of how we had created the purchase request and invoice platform and we inserted it there. But bear in mind, Jeanne, we didn't change everything. We just basically said, "Your expense procedures were roughly the same. It'll be on a different platform. We are just streamlining it down from 20 fields of population to five." And guess what, it will be auto-populated for you when you scan your receipt. That is the main point. And as I said before, finance automation was very important, but we didn't just focus on finance automation. We made sure source data was clean from the get-go.

Jeanne Dion:

Okay. That is critical. Right? That source data that you have to put together. And you talked a little bit, you mentioned this too, the idea that you looked at your policy first before you started going into the configuration and the ideation around the pain points and where you could move that. I think that is a critical component to anybody doing an implementation of any type of tool because you can't build something for the future if you're building it on ideas of the past. And I know that's critical for Dermalogica. Right, Jenny? I mean, you guys are growing at an enormous scale. So when you thought about this, how did you think about building for the future versus just building for the now?

Jenny Chen:

That's a great question because when we talked to vendors about these platforms, obviously every vendor is going to say, yes, they can do everything, they can do the world. But what I wanted out of the platform was not a right now solution. I am looking at right now, plus five years, plus 10 years. Is it easy for someone like me to have access to upgrade divisions, the change the workflow, to keep everything in line with the current company policy? So we wanted to make sure we could play with that, not just me as an administrator, someone in the IT office may be able to upgrade that if I'm not around. We wanted that to be seamless and accessible to the people that are working in the office. We didn't want to create a platform whereby we always had to hire a consultant. We wanted to make sure the rules and policies worked specifically for our current company policy and that it was easy for someone like me, as an administrator, to upgrade with a 24-hour turnaround.

Jeanne Dion:

So I'm hearing you talk about this idea of ownership. Right? You talk about accountability within your users, but you also talk about accountability for yourself. You have taken this mindset of it is continuous growth, the platforms have to grow with the company. And in that growth, you have to be able to control that and understand what's going on. So talk to me a little bit about how you are doing that continuous learning to improve and the tools that you're using for that because I think it's a unique approach. It's one that I took when I was doing things that I always wanted to know everything about how it worked so that when somebody came to me with a problem, I could say, "Oh, yes. We can handle this, and here's the best way to do it." But I'm not sure that it's always something that we think about when we start to implement a tool, so just curious how you have gone about doing this to ensure that you are up-to-date and always able to answer those questions.

Jenny Chen:

I'm going to divulge a secret now, which may or may not be good. Listen, when we started, we didn't know anything about SAP Concur. Actually, we didn't know anything about trying to implement a new platform. And the secret basically is to do your homework and you go to the conferences. You go to the free seminars. And whenever you embark on a new platform, they will give you every information on this Earth. And people do get inundated and ignore that. But what I've found was that the SAP Concur support platform, I think it's called Contact Support, it's like a Google platform for Concur. And you literally go and you populate the field like how to upgrade divisions. And then it will give you a list of information, of documentation, or of people actually asking the same question and how to go about that.

So we used that quite extensively in the first year. Obviously, we didn't want to rely on consultants or expertise. We want to make sure we could play with that ourselves. And it is literally at our fingertips. Now the main point I want to stress to you all who are listening is you cherry-pick. Do not get flustered or feel overwhelmed. You cherry-pick specific conferences, specific seminars that will work to your company values. So that way, it won't be so overwhelming and it's not so much confusion around what you should do. You have to always make sure that your main value, your main focus, is how the company is heading, so that's how I approached it. I still use this specific contact support platform even to this day because I know, like you, Jeanne, the buck stops with me here. I have to be able to answer anything, everything, update, and we have to make sure the system is running smoothly. We make sure that we could update policies on a 24-hour turnaround. So you've got to do your research. You're thinking the long run, and you prep yourself for it with this particular platform.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. So in this case, you were really an advocate, not only for your program, but you're an advocate for yourself. Right? It takes time to do this.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. It takes a lot of time and you have all these other things happening. Would you have some sort of advice for somebody who says, "I've got a full-time day job. I'm managing this project. And now you're telling me that I need to go out and learn everything about the tool"? I'm sure you felt the same way when you were looking at it and saying, "There aren't enough hours in the day." Right?

Jenny Chen:

Yeah.

Jeanne Dion:

What would be your advice to somebody who comes back to you and says, "I am so overwhelmed. I can't do this"?

Jenny Chen:

Okay. The first thing I would say is, calm down, get a stiff drink. And then the second thing I would say is approach it how you would if you ever raised a child, or if you have had a situation in your job, focus on just the one. So try to simplify that entire platform into the one thing first. And when you are able to resolve one, and then you resolve the next one, you will feel yourself calming down. And as I said with our previous conversation, you cherry-pick because if you go and try to learn an entire platform of what they can do from A to Z, you will, one, you'll lose focus because you won't put your company as the first priority. And two, you won't be able to create efficiencies that you want to see.

So when we started, I just said, "Okay, there's too much to improve. What the hell?" So I just thought, "Okay, let me have a look at where the data's coming from." That's where I would start for anyone who's starting. And even if it's not in finance yet, you just look at where the data was coming from. You try to connect the dots and you find one process that is simpler because when you start with the simple things first, the harder things get easier because you've created that efficiency in a simpler process from the data of origination, so that's how we started first. We looked at what the users were creating because that was the source data for us. And if we could clean that up, then at least at the back end of finance automation, the pain points were a lot cleaner.

Jeanne Dion:

Yep. I love that approach and I also like that idea that you have really taken ownership of learning the administrator side of the platform, and that's really helping you exponentially in the idea of how you're strategising on making change and how you strategise for your corporation's growth. By keeping up with that, I think it's something that is a difficult piece to do, but to know every piece of how that administration of it works helps you get to the least amount of work for your stakeholders and for your users, but it also allows you to be really efficient and effective to support the growth of your organisation. And for customers who are in the throes of an implementation, or are thinking about implementation, one of the great resources for this is talking to people at Concur.

We can actually identify areas, to Jenny's point, that are important for you to know right off the bat. We can help you understand and identify those areas that are going to give you, I guess we'd call it the best reward for the least amount of effort, and then we can move forward from there, so something for everybody to keep in mind. One of the things that I did want to talk to you about is all of this change and growth, all of this understanding of where your company is going, you really had to have a North Star for this entire process. And would you mind sharing with me how you came to that North Star and who you used to help continue to drive that North Star through all of the transformation that your organisation came to.

Jenny Chen:

Well, that's quite an easy one because I basically focused on my staff members, everyone in our organisation. And at Dermalogica, their values are predominantly based on that they have a very cohesive organisation and people are very much in each other's pockets. So you need to be able to make sure that they are the priority. And because we are a small to medium enterprise, we're not in the thousands yet, we can actually focus on divisions and values of what our corporation is instilled with. So as I said, we don't look at it as a project, we look at it as trying to help them. If you use different words when you speak to your stakeholders, you will get a different reaction. And we did actually make the time to look at the structure, look at the values, look at the requirements of particular divisions.

Because we were intimately involved with all the transactional keying in of particular expenses and purchase requests and invoices, we were very intimate with what each division or each stakeholder needed. And that really helped because if the platform could throw us A, B, and C, we would say, "No. Thank you, but we only need A and B," because we were very sure of what we needed for our particular organization. And I do want to stress to you all out there that you don't go and follow the trend. You look towards what your company specific unique identities are and you work with that. And don't create a right now approach, look in the long run. Look what you want in the next five years, in the next 10 years. Look what kind of values your organisation is working on because every time you work for your company alone, your unique identity for a company, you'll always, always win that goal.

Jeanne Dion:

Well, I could talk to you for a lot longer, but I want to be mindful of your time. I know there's a lot going on in your world because as we're recording this, it's getting close to the end of the month, and as all of us know from an accounts payable perspective, that's a busy time. That's a very busy time.

Jenny Chen:

It's a do not disturb online time.

Jeanne Dion:

Correct. So I want to thank you first for coming in and doing this, but I want to kind of summarise a couple of the key learnings and just make sure that I've got it right for our group. So you said it really quite eloquently about not chasing the trends. But I think that really translates into you need to understand your business and the tools that run your business because if you do that, you will have both the strategic and tactical views that you need to not only create that North Star, but to create that growth scenario.

Jenny Chen:

That's correct, yes. It's very hard sometimes when you are in growth and you don't know where you are sitting. But what you do know is that you will be expanding. So most small to medium enterprises are on that trajectory. It's a matter of knowing your staff members and it's a matter of knowing whether a particular platform is able to coordinate with your particular growth. So if you know that you are working with less technology driven people, then you work with that, so you don't go an implement a platform within your three months. You try to extend that to your six months. You infuse that transaction, that automation for particular platforms in stages rather than sprints, as people call it in the project world. And that is the key to gaining the efficiencies that you want without disrupting anyone's workload.

I mean, I could have 150 people on my back saying, "I have a job to do, Jen." You can't go and create these transitions and then leave me hanging. You can't give them that kind of overwhelming instability in a job. So I think from our point of view, if someone told me I don't know what we want, I would say, "Great. That's an amazing feat. We've done well in our organisation."

Jeanne Dion:

That kind of leads me to that second takeaway that I have from you, which is that idea that ties back to the: Why did we win the award? You made this such an easy and seamless process. You made the change feel fluid and seamless and accessible. I think at one point and time you explained to me you kind of kept it simple. You designed it for a grandma. You designed it for somebody who wasn't always tech savvy, but it still provided the right technology that you needed. And I think that simplification of the whole process for end users to feel free to do their best work and not overwhelm them with all of the innovation, but just bring it to them and say, "Hey, look, this rate of change is going to happen. A lot is going to stay the same, but some things are going to change. And they're going to change for the better. We're going to make it easier for you. But here's all the pieces that are going to stay the same," so you can get success from that and get buy in from the get-go.

Jenny Chen:

That's correct. That's correct. When you look at particular platforms, the ones that are very successful in the world, it's very straightforward because they are looking at the whole world as a stakeholder. So I guess when I do look at a platform, I'm thinking, "I'm finance, I understand expenses. I understand how to create a platform." But if I was talking to someone in marketing, I don't expect them to know how to use a platform. Or if they're in sales, I don't expect them to spend another 20 minutes online to figure out how to create a request or submit something. I want it to be within a second. I want it to be within less than a minute for submission. So how do I go around doing that?

And I think the best way to try and get an idea is you do need to talk to your people and you do also need, as you said, Jeanne, take it from point of view where you are literally throwing this to your own grandma, to people out in the world. Would they understand it? If they don't, then go back to the drawing board. Simplify that because the best platforms I've seen are the easiest. So I think that also helps in regards to trying to implement controls, trying to implement platforms into your organisation.

Jeanne Dion:

So the final thing that I learned is that in my next life, I want to come and work at Dermalogica because I'm a big fan of chocolate.

Jenny Chen:

Oh, thank you.

Jeanne Dion:

And so that idea of chocolate and coffee as motivators kind of silly in the way that I'm thinking about it, but in the end, it really does help you bring those people. You don't just need the evangelists who are there. You need the people who have come in for that chocolate and coffee who were kind of the naysayers to help you go ahead and bring forward the project and head off some of those complaints or concerns before they hit the masses. And I think that's a really important thing that you did that was really helping you be successful.

Jenny Chen:

That's correct. We made sure that this platform could not only advance the millennials as we call them in our office. They grew up with a phone in their hand, and obviously, they would know how to use an app or a platform to their advantage, so we made sure that platform was flexible enough for the millennials so they weren't bored. It was fast enough for them. But we also made sure that it started from a simplified process. So even if you weren't very confident in your technology, one, you didn't have to populate a lot of fields. It was the same process and you always, always have someone in the office that can help you, whether it be a one on one, a workshop. We made sure that the whole company, not just the millennials, but the whole company was continuously upskilled. I think that's a very important thing to remember, that technology is always going to change. Your current company policy will always change.

And if your platform always stays the same, then no one will be innovating and transitioning as you had wanted. And that's when you throw in those words, and then that's when you get the request as, "Why? What did we win? I don't understand." So that's how I look at it. You need to be able to try and pinpoint where those, as you call them, the laggards, are. And you don't go and banish them. You work with them, a continuous improvement and up-skilling of your organisation is very important, Jeanne. I cannot stress that any more than what I'm saying now. It is so important to make sure that your policies are in line with the stakeholders and that the stakeholders are continuously being upgraded, continuously having those coffees with you because then that's when the whole organisation's moving forward.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you so much, Jenny, for saying it that way. And thank you for your time today.

Jenny Chen:

Thank you.

Jeanne Dion:

I really enjoyed talking with you and I know we have a lot of people listening in who have taken a lot away from this conversation. It's really been a great one.

Jenny Chen:

Thank you. I really enjoyed speaking to you, Jeanne. So hopefully, I will have helped you guys out there. And please email me or find me on LinkedIn if you need some pointers because I'm very passionate about trying to improve these small to medium enterprises. People that get you into these enterprises, you must remember to keep them as the North Star, as the priority in any platform that you look to.

Jeanne Dion:

Wow. Thank you for that. That's a very generous offer, so I want to thank you for that. And I also want to thank everyone for listening to this episode of The SAP Concur Conversations Podcast. To hear more exclusive insights or interviews from the world of business, travel, expense, and invoice processing, be sure to subscribe and listen wherever you find your podcasts. And please join us again for our next SAP Concur Conversation.

Want to hear more conversations like this one? Check out the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts so you never miss an episode.