For far too long, managing employee expenses has been a time-consuming process that requires manual data entry and reconciliation to bridge the gap between business bank accounts and ERP systems. In the absence of an integrated workflow, finance teams use multiple systems to manage credit card and cash payments, and finding receipts. In most cases, they also lack real-time visibility into company spending.

The complexity grows exponentially as businesses expand, especially into new regions. Extra administration required to manage new bank accounts, card issuers, and local accounting systems impedes decision making and negatively impacts revenues and growth. Businesses of all sizes struggle with this, but it can be especially challenging for medium to large enterprises.

Payhawk set out to help businesses overcome these challenges when we founded the company in 2018. We combine VISA company cards, reimbursable expenses, and accounts payable into a single product. Our customers can automate manual processes, maximize efficiency, and accelerate business expansion.

Setting up our first cloud cluster in less than a week

To support growth and attract investment we were keen to launch our solution on a scalable, future-proof IT architecture that didn’t require extensive technical support. This is where Google Cloud made a big impression, especially the user interface and documentation which massively reduces the resources required to set up clusters and put them into production.

I’m a CTO, not a DevOps specialist, but in less than a week I was able to set up a secure, reliable operating infrastructure. This enabled us to fast-track our application development and we were able to issue our first card in just eight months. Our Google Cloud partner, Cloud Office also gave us valuable assistance, guiding us through the deployment process and advising on Google Cloud’s extensive range of solutions.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) played a critical role, accelerating the deployment and management of our cloud native applications. We use Cloud SQL as our database while other important tools include Cloud Memorystore, Vision AI, Cloud Storage and Artifact Registry for our wider data storage and application needs. With Firebase we’ve been able to build a notification system for mobile devices.

Another incentive is that most other cloud solutions require add-on services to build and keep your product live. With Google Cloud, all the services that Payhawk needs including logging, metrics, monitoring of resources, and utilization of CPU memory come as standard.

For instance, I was really impressed by Google Cloud’s operations suite, which includes Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. If there are any anomalies in our cloud architecture, we can track and resolve them with minimal disruption to our operations. This also removes the need to invest in an additional observability solution.

Reliability that builds customer trust

Google Cloud also supports Payhawk’s mission to put customers at the center of our organization. Thanks to Google Cloud error reporting and tracking and Google Cloud single sign on, Payhawk’s engineering team can anticipate customer issues and correct them in less than one hour. Trust is everything, and Google Cloud gives us the tools to boost customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships.

As a young business, managing costs is also a priority. The Google for Startups Cloud Program, which includes credits for Google software and tools, enabled us to push the business forward without having to worry about financing our infrastructure, especially in the first year. This gave us breathing room to work through funding, application development, and the onboarding of our first customers.

In addition, Google Cloud gives us confidence that we can grow the business fast. In most months we have seen more than 10% growth — in some cases it’s been 20%. In the first half of 2022, the business doubled in size, but Google Cloud gave us the flexibility to scale our infrastructure, adding storage, memory, and processing power as we onboarded new customers. The pricing model is also generous so that we can grow our revenues while keeping control of operational expenditure.

Since launch we have acquired a valuable mix of customers from startups to large businesses that want to reduce the costs of their expenses programs and increase employee satisfaction. They include ATU, a German automobile servicing company, which has successfully digitized its entire procurement process, and Discordia, a Bulgarian logistics business with 10,000 trucks, which has issued Payhawk cards to all its drivers.

Looking to the future, it’s no exaggeration to say that Google Cloud is a foundation of our business and has given investors confidence in our operations. From a first seeding round of €3 million, early this year we closed a Series B extension of $100 million. This gives us a valuation of $1bn and makes Payhawk the first ever Bulgarian unicorn.

We now operate in 32 countries in Europe and the US, and plan to double our team by the end of the year. It feels like we’ve come a long way since we first started using Google Cloud, and I’m thrilled that we have Google Cloud as a global technology partner supporting our mission to transform expense management and financial operations worldwide.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

“Talk about tough times, right?”

That’s how Dan Stuart, Senior Vice President of IT Services at Southwire Company, refers to the months following a December 2019 ransomware event, and the COVID crisis that began in spring of 2020. Those events hit just as the company was preparing for an overhaul of their SAP environment. This comprehensive plan included three key elements. First, the company wanted to upgrade their SAP ECC environment to take advantage of the latest functionality available for this critical ERP system. Second, Southwire aimed to deploy SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA to accelerate vital reporting for all business users. Third, the company wanted to upgrade to the latest version of SAP Process Orchestration—an essential component that touches key manufacturing interfaces in all Southwire facilities. 

Southwire had looked at multiple options for the upgrades, including remaining entirely on-premises, colocation, and full cloud migration. “Going to the cloud seemed a lot more compelling,” says Joe Schleupner, Southwire’s Senior Director of PMO & ITS planning and implementation. “We were going to the cloud eventually, so why take these intermediary steps? Let’s just get it done.”

After looking at several options, Southwire decided to migrate to Google Cloud. “We wanted to be on a platform for SAP that was flexible, scalable, and secure; that we could count on to get up and running quickly,” says Stuart. “We chose Google Cloud not only for those reasons, but also because we recognize that Google has other assets that we may be able to take advantage of down the line, such as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).” 

More stability, less worry

As one of the leading manufacturers of wire and cable used in the transmission and distribution of electricity, Southwire aids the delivery of power to millions of people worldwide. They have more than 30 manufacturing facilities across the United States running 24/7. Any downtime directly affects productivity and revenue. With help from Google Cloud and their implementation partner NIMBL, Southwire completed the SAP migration to Google Cloud over a planned maintenance weekend on July 4th.

The migration itself, while complex, went quickly and smoothly. “Just moving to the cloud was quite a feat because we were dealing with so much data, but in total the SAP system was down for only ~16 hours,” says Schleupner.

“As a project manager, I always felt that Google Cloud had my back” Schleupner says. The Process Orchestration (PO) migration was of particular concern, considering that it controlled all of Southwire’s manufacturing interfaces across the entire company. “Every critical piece of information that goes from SAP down to the manufacturing system goes through that system,” says Schleupner.

Even after migrating, Southwire discovered that making changes to the system was fast, easy, and resulted in no downtime. Normally, certain types of changes would have involved taking down SAP for at least an hour.

The Southwire team also appreciates the fact that the modern cloud architecture means spending less time on routine infrastructure maintenance. “It’s one less thing for me to worry about,” Stuart says, “I can focus on the business side of the house and move the technology and responsibilities to what we do within the Google Cloud Platform.”

What comes next?

While the cloud migration will increase stability, uptime, performance, and security, there is much more to come. Southwire is currently working on a disaster recovery implementation for their SAP environment on Google Cloud. Stuart and Schleupner are excited about where Google Cloud can further take Southwire. They are considering an SAP Hybris e-commerce implementation as well as connected factory and/or factory automation initiatives that can take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

To Stuart and Schleupner, the migration of Southwire’s SAP environment to Google Cloud, as important as it was, really represents the first step in the company’s tech evolution. Now that much of the heavy lifting is complete, Southwire’s digital transformation can begin in earnest. “There’s no shortage of areas where I think Google Cloud will come into play,” Stuart says, “and we intend to look at these things with an open mind to understand how we can leverage current investments to take our organization where we want to go.”

Learn more about Southwire’s SAP on Google Cloud deployment and how Google Cloud can transform the way you work with your SAP enterprise applications. Visit cloud.google.com/solutions/sap.

One of India’s best-known healthcare brands, Manipal Group prides itself on clinical excellence and a patient-centric approach. From humble beginnings in 1953 as a single teaching hospital—the Kasturba Medical College—in a university town in Karnataka, India, Manipal Group has grown to a presence in seven cities in India and operations in Malaysia and Nigeria. “Our founder, Dr T. M. A. Pai, established Kasturba Medical College just six years after India gained independence,” says C. G. Muthana, Chief Operating Officer, Teaching Hospitals, Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd, part of Manipal Group.

Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd operates 11 corporate, or for-profit, hospitals and five teaching hospitals. “We have about 7,000 beds India-wide, and on that measure, we are the third-largest private-sector healthcare provider in India today,” says Muthana. The organization now employs about 6,000 people in its corporate hospitals and 5,000 people in its teaching hospitals.

Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd acquires and operates world-class medical technologies in its teaching and corporate hospitals. However, with 75% of corporate hospital wards allocated to fee-paying private patients—compared to just 25% of the wards in teaching hospitals—the differences in information technology budgets are significant. “In the general wards that comprise most of the wards in teaching hospitals, patients are typically treated for free or at heavily subsidized rates,” explains Muthana. “So revenues and costs of delivery vary between hospitals, while employee costs remain similar.”

Rostering nurses a critical task

Rostering nurses to work shifts is one of the most important tasks at Manipal Group corporate and teaching hospitals. As at all hospitals, nurses administer medications, monitor patients, maintain records, manage intravenous lines, and work with doctors to heal patients. They can also provide advice and support to patients and loved ones, including teaching them how to administer medication outside a hospital setting. If too few nurses are rostered for a particular shift, the quality of patient care may suffer.

Google Cloud results

• Enabled the hospital to correctly size its nursing workforce
• Lowers stress on nurses by delivering more equitable rostering
• Presents opportunity to better manage nurses’ leave and other administration tasks

However, rostering at the group’s hospitals was a time-consuming exercise. Senior nurses on each ward would have to spend up to 45 minutes per day manually amending paper-based rosters to accommodate requested changes to duty shifts for personal or other circumstances. The organization began receiving complaints from patients, doctors, and other hospital staff that, on occasion, too few nurses were rostered on for certain shifts—particularly at its flagship hospital in Bangalore. “We had based our rostering calculations on the number of beds occupied by patients and, when we investigated, we found at a macro level, we were rostering on the correct number of nurses,” says Muthana. “However, on some days, on wards optimally staffed by, say, 10 nurses per shift, we might have 14 nurses rostered on for one shift and seven rostered on for another shift. Those times we had seven, we had a clear shortage.”

In 2012, Muthana asked a consultant to develop algorithms to help automate the rostering. “Unfortunately, there were so many variables, the consultant failed to solve the problem,” he says. The Chief Operating Officer’s next step was to ask the founder and Chief Executive Officer of predictive analytics business Retigence Technologies—already working with the business on a materials management project—to develop an application to manage rostering.

Removing the daily drudgery

“Our plan with the automation project was to relieve our senior nurses of the daily drudgery of amending the rosters and to deliver rosters that were as fair as possible to all our staff,” says Muthana. “We also saw an opportunity to reduce our costs by reducing the overall number of nurses needed to look after our patients.”

Retigence Technologies’ team members then worked with the group’s nurses to capture the variables and requirements for the project. For example, a minimum number of nurses with one year experience or more needs to be rostered on for each shift. Retigence Technologies then started building an application using compute resources available through Compute Engine, a Google Cloud product. “We selected Google primarily because of its pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” says Srinibas Behera, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Retigence Technologies.

With the nurses rostering application developed, Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd undertook several pilots to build user acceptance. “Some of our senior nurses took time to accept the fact automation removed their control over rostering assignments, but were finally convinced by the better transparency the product offered,” says Muthana. The organization deployed the application to a smaller hospital and secured user support before rolling out the application to its Bangalore flagship.

Eliminating stress

Deploying the application has enabled Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd to remove a buffer of about 100 nurses retained to accommodate the variations in number of nurses rostered for individual shifts. “The savings on those salaries more than paid for the cost of developing the application,” says Muthana.

The application also enabled the organization to reduce the stress on nurses—both the nurses in charge of the rosters and the nurses subject to the rosters. “Night shifts were more equitably distributed among the nurses, while we have been able to reduce the 45 minutes per day required to amend rosters to just 10 minutes,” says Muthana. “In Bangalore alone, we have 51 nurses in charge of rostering—so the combined saving there equates to nearly 30 hours per day.” This is freeing up these senior nurses to complete more important tasks.

The application was subsequently implemented at Kasturba Hospital, Manipal, again reducing the time needed to generate complete nursing rosters to less than 10 minutes.

Managing leave and training

The organization now plans to extend the application to manage leave and training for its nurses and other employees. “I would like to see every employee given an annual leave plan that is added to the roster at the start of the year,” says Muthana. “The flexibility and control afforded by the application would enable us to address challenges such as managing leave across a workforce with high attrition rates.” The organization would also be able to create a calendar to ensure nurses receive all their required training.

“We also plan to keep fine-tuning the application to deploy nurses more efficiently and continue to reduce their stress levels,” adds Muthana. “We also want to create a nursing load indicator tailored to patients’ specific circumstances. For example, a sedated patient may not require much nursing care, whereas a patient who comes in with a broken leg and may be on a ventilator may require assistance from three nurses at once.” The business plans to use Google’s AI and machine learning APIs in the future to improve the value and user experience of the product.