The road to change
The investment case may have been made – but taking a transformation from idea to fruition requires focus and dedication, something HighRadius amply provides.
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n the gap between promise and reality sits good process. Every CFO knows that having the right strategy – or indeed technology – means nothing if the execution is not right. And, certainly, the temptation to adopt a Big Bang approach remains: global transformation processes launched simultaneously across the world in a blaze of excitement is an attractive prospect. Yet few big transformations benefit from that approach, as Hana Bísková points out.
A bigger bang? “My advice would be don’t go with the ‘big bang’ – just try to do a fit gap analysis on your countries, choose the one that represents best the picture of the standard processes that you’re looking for, the blueprint, and go with that one; because that’s what you should be driving towards. And if you can make that successful, then you know what the other
CASE STUDY Danone
Global food giant Danone has a diverse customer segment of over 1,000 customers – from small corner shops to big-box retailers like Walmart. With a global presence, and geographically distributed operations, Danone had shared services for its A/R present across multiple business units.
Its decentralised system meant the receivables team faced three core challenges: increased process complexity with high volumes of short pays, high manual processing of deductions, and poor visibility in the collections process.
“We handle all the credit evaluation, cash application, collections, and deductions management within our shared services department in North America,” says Jacob Whetstone, director, credit and accounts receivable at Danone. “Most of these operations were processed in-house and had a high manual intervention.”
The key, then, was to streamline Danone’s processes and address the key challenges created by its legacy systems that had left Danone with a tangle of formats.
Indeed, the company had 24 different portals for remittance data aggregation since no
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
remittance data for e-payments were provided by the bank.
“Initially when we would apply cash, we would have two screens, the first one would have the remittance data and the other would showcase the SAP-related data,” says Whetstone. “But for a lot of these payments we had to undergo multiple steps – not just look at the remittance, but also go to the portal and download documents, which was too time-consuming.”
Working with HighRadius on an AP automation transformation project Danone was able achieve: out-of-box engines for parsing remittance from multiple formats delivered 90%+ cash application automation in under 90 days
automated short-payment reason code identification during cash application, increasing the speed of deduction resolution and recovery
automated linking of claims, PODs, BOLs with the deduction case
fast-tracked research, resolution, and recovery
centralised view of deduction resolution status, which helped follow-up with sales, distribution or customers for timely resolution.
Ultimately, Danone was able to increase the visibility in its deductions process through smart automation. The deductions cloud provides visibility into the status of each deduction case and offers updates on the progress of every dispute case in the pipeline. This increased visibility in the process and automatic dispute resolution has helped Danone’s A/R team to reduce DDO by 25%.
“With HighRadius, everything is connected and we have a single source of truth,” says Whetstone. “They have always wanted to see us succeed as well and so we’ve had great success just partnering with them. This is what drove us towards HighRadius and got us where we are.”
Products cash application cloud collections cloud deductions cloud claims and POD automation.
Benefits 75% improvement in FTE productivity 95% straight-through automation of cash application
25% reduction in DDO 75% increase in productivity.
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countries need in order to get there. And it’s really important that there is alignment between different departments on what they want to achieve.” Once the finance team has come on-board with the project, Bísková’s role is to run a maturity assessment, to understand how ready the company’s processes are and where the first points of action should be. “We have a set of high level questions for each of the sub-processes within order to cash that can categorise their level of maturity,” she explains. “That helps us identify the pain points that represent the low-hanging fruit that really can start the journey.” Taking that approach can deliver solid initial impact and should help steer the next stage of the transformation project. “Those improvements tend to be seen first in working capital, but also in terms of customer and internal employee satisfaction,” Bísková says. “This is then where we can dedicate
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