Nadine Gradel is the Senior Manager, Transactional Accounting at Disneyland Paris. Her AP department is digitally transforming at pace as Disneyland Paris begins a huge renovation project of its park. In this interview, Nadine outlines her role in driving change.
How is your business changing and what does that mean for your role?
Innovation and transformation are at the heart of Disneyland Paris right now. We’ve announced a €2.5 billion renovation plan for our parks to create a greater customer experience. So we’re seeing lots of change across our entire organization.
As a back-office function, we’re there to support the business, so we must change as well. In AP, our core objective is to pay suppliers on time, so we must break free from our manual, legacy process and go digital to do this.
How is Tradeshift helping you go digital and change?
Tradeshift is a key partner in our digital transformation journey. Their platform is allowing us to embrace new technology and go digital far quicker than ever before. They’re also best in class for supplier onboarding. Getting this right is crucial to going digital.
Around 18% of our invoice flow was digital before we adopted Tradeshift. This meant our team was handling lots of paper and working on lots of non-value adding tasks most of the time. Today, 45% of our invoice flow is digital, which is a huge success, and we’re planning on going even higher.
What are the most painful aspects of change?
Change management is very challenging. No matter what you’re doing you’ll always encounter people resistant to change. And you’ll never be successful unless you’re able to convince these people that change is positive. So you must spend as much time as needed to work with them and help them embrace change.
What does success look like?
Success means delivering what is expected of us: paying invoices on time. This will help our company have the best possible relationship with our suppliers, which will go a long way to allowing the business to achieve its ambitious objectives.
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