Breaking the Silo Mentality in Order-to-Cash Teams

Businesses are familiar with organizational silos hindering collaboration, but today, this presents itself with fresh urgency. In this fast-paced global market, efficiency and agility are of utmost importance. These two qualities are difficult, if not impossible to achieve in a heavily fragmented company with negligible cross-team collaboration.

Despite the efforts to break the siloed mentality within order-to-cash (O2C) teams, most organizations are struggling to cross the barriers on their way to success. This leads to multiple teams having different goals and objectives, including those which are not aligned to the organizational goals. Even though different teams have their own individual target to accomplish, what must not be forgotten is the common organizational goal- Revenue Growth with Minimum Risk Exposure.

This makes the breaking of silos in order-to-cash teams an urgent necessity and of utmost importance in order to increase visibility across processes and achieve the common organizational goal.

Is a siloed O2C process affecting your organization?

Every action has a reaction, likewise, every siloed business process has a detrimental impact on the overall growth of the organization. Working in silos simply means prioritizing individual objectives over your team’s objectives. This leads to a downturn in terms of revenue growth and risk exposure. Let’s learn in detail about some of them:

1. Impact on Customer Relationship:

Make the customer the hero of your story!

Customer is king and in Order-to-Cash, customer experience plays a vital role. Ineffective communication between the A/R teams might hinder customer experience. Unavailability of real-time information might cause unnecessary dunning calls by collectors to their customers, resulting in dissatisfied customers. What’s noteworthy is that continued dissatisfaction on the customer’s part could result in:

• Customer’s lack of trust with order management teams
• Customers may levy fines on wrong or late orders
• Customers may stop doing business with you

2. Impact on Profits:

Profit is not something to add on at the end, it is something to plan for in the beginning!

Profit is the most global aspect of a business, but while doing the math for profit margins, most companies consider costs related to component, packaging, and shipping. But there are some hard costs that get excluded from the calculation such as:

• Deduction write-offs
• Late payments
• Compliance fee
• FTE productivity lost

These costs add up later to have a negative impact on your company’s profit margin.

3. Impact on KPIs:

If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it!

When KPIs are measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates. No visibility of information across departments due to disconnected operations might have a negative impact on KPIs.

Want to ensure better collaboration between the A/R teams?

Here are some best practices to help you achieve this goal.

Breaking down silos means real-time visibility of information across all departments. But how to achieve that? A good place to start would be developing effective strategies that could break down the siloed mentality and help create a unified vision for the employees working towards a common goal. Let’s have a look at some of the approaches:

1. Developing A Culture For Fulfilling Fiscal Responsibility:

Understanding fiscal responsibility and accountability is essential to the financial growth of the company.

In the world of Order to Cash, Fiscal responsibility could be defined as processing orders under the right condition, doing credit risk analysis, and doing everything that’s going to be right for the company to meet the goals and objectives and moving forward to have a better profit margin.

2. Defining SLAs For Order-to-cash Teams:

In the world of the internet, it is important to remember that your competitor is just one mouse click away.

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and its customers that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet.

3. Leveraging Technology:

The great growling engine of change is leveraging technology.

It is difficult to have complete visibility between teams across the company without leveraging technology. An integrated receivables platform can effectively solve this problem by connecting all the teams on a single platform.

“In today’s world, it’s hard to break silos without leveraging technology, and some of the things that I’m seeing here at HighRadius, it’s unbelievable. We personally use the HighRadius- Cash Application Cloud, and I’m going to tell you one thing that it saved my department from five hours of work every day”

-Greg Ottalagano, Manager of A/R and Credit, Church & Dwight

Breaking The Silos: Benefits of an interconnected order-to-cash process

Order-to-cash teams need to provide real-time visibility to the finance executives for more accurately determining profit margin and customer profitability. Greg Ottalagano of Church & Dwight believes that an interconnected order-to-cash can effectively improve customer experience with better visibility and streamlined operations.