CASE STUDY Sanofi
French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is focused on the research and development, manufacturing and marketing of drugs – principally in the prescription market but also over-the-counter medication.
Over time, its receivables landscape encompassed 70 manufacturing sites with over 100,000+ employees across the world. As such, it faced a number of challenges, including multiple systems and formats with patchy automation across territories. That led to poor efficiency and a lack of clarity among teams into goal setting and end-to-end processes – resulting in a ‘dumbing down’ of the workflow.
Sanofi engaged HighRadius in order to achieve the following goals:
To develop one model for one community developing a single IT process to deliver uniform and standardised process overall.
To improve operational efficiency Sanofi wanted to streamline its processes and eliminate manual workloads through smarter automation. It also wanted a way forward while reducing its A/R overdue processing.
To increase internal customer satisfaction it required a system that gave them better visibility into metrics and KPIs that it needed to track.
The results
With the solution in place, Sanofi achieved great results, leveraging 85% automation in the Russian operation, and going from 0% to 60% in Hungary. It also improved on existing automation practices, boosting its French operation from 50% to 88%.
By incorporating the HighRadius Cash Application Cloud Solution, Sanofi enjoyed improved functionality, which helped it:
Auto-aggregate remittance from various sources Remittances could be auto-extracted across various sources and formats such as check stubs, emails, EDIs, web portals – without any manual intervention. The cash app team could then view these remittances in a consolidated format in the solution.
Automate cash reconciliation and deduction coding The solution leveraged AI capabilities to accurately auto-link payments with the open invoices and ensure automated deduction coding. This meant cash application analysts could spend more time on other high-value tasks.
Reduce lockbox keying-in fees
It leveraged multiple OCR engines to eliminate lockbox fees by auto-capturing payment and remittance data in an accurate manner.
Easily deploy, ERP-agnostic solution
The cash application cloud could seamlessly integrate with the existing ERPs across the globe without any major business disruption.
the leakages. Get that right, and you’re talking significant numbers”.
Beyond that, improved transparency in areas such as supply chain can have a significant impact on customer relationships, particularly around issues like blocked orders. “It’s hugely valuable to organisations to understand where the issues are,” Hullait says. “And, of course, automation can bring reduction in manual effort and once again we see operating expenditure reduction in staff costs, for example.”
Profound change
But while those quantitative elements are immediate and felt on the bottom line, the most successful implementations deliver a more profound qualitative impact too. “Ultimately it’s about using technology to provide a better experience to your customers,” says Hullait, pointing out that simply winning a customer is only half of the story – how you treat them over the long term is just as important. “We have all been in that situation where you win a new client or you win a new customer and you are in the honeymoon period. But that can very quickly evaporate.
“They might have a bad experience in the on-boarding process, or through the continuing interactions that they have,” he continues. “So it’s hugely important that the tools and technology you use have a feel-good factor around them.” And, of course, offering staff the chance to work with a more automated system can be an effective recruitment and retention tool. “For those smart young analysts coming into finance and accounting, keeping them in a role that involves lots of repetitive manual tasks is a real challenge,” Hullait adds. “Now, though, with automated AR solutions, the technology does it all for them: it predicts who they should call, it even dials them for you on a certain day, with all the notes captured for you. Why would you not embrace that technology so you can spend your time on more value-added activities?”
A little help
Some innovations are game changing – and HighRadius believes that FREDA is just that. FREDA is a virtual assistant tool that uses AI to continuously learn based on interactions with users. By deploying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), FREDA is able to answer over 7,000 different use-cases in credit and A/R. And, Hana Bísková explains, Freda will only get better with time. “FREDA is there to help teams prioritise and give them insights during their daily work,” she says. “She’s not really there to do the work itself – but she is there to assist and then let’s go to create one use case.” So far in the field, FREDA’s benefits have been mainly manifested through supplying support during customer calls. “We know that during calls,
32 Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
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