Learn How Danone Cut Cash Application Costs by 75% Using AI

About Danone

Danone is a transnational food and products based company founded in Barcelona and established out of Paris. In 2013, emerging markets around the world accounted for over 60% of Group sales for Danone. In 2018, the Danone Group employed over 105,783 people worldwide. They are valued at 24.65 billion Euros. Danone North America has three different business units.

The Cash Application at Danone

With a shared service model, Danone faced many challenges in processing receivables. The key challenge was redundancy and duplicate efforts to ensure accurate data across the business units. The Cash Application, Collections, Credit, and Deductions processes were 100% manual.

Cash Application process alone had 4 FTEs. The payment mix mostly included ACH and Wire Transfer. Checks attributed to almost 5% of the total dollar amount, while e-payments constituted 95%.

They had multiple lockboxes spanning across various geographies. While electronic payments were faster to receive, processing them was an entirely different story as there were 24 portals in use for collecting remittances. The cash analysts downloaded and sorted through remittance information manually. Other sources of remittance included emails, EDI files and check stubs.

Remittance aggregation, payment linkage along-with code deduction and manual input into the SAP system, resulted in many shortcomings.

• Processing electronic payments meant 128 man-hours per week.
• Processing checks constituted 140 man-hours per week.
• Delay in cash posting led to delay dispute identification and resolution, negatively impacting customer behavior.

Goals & Objectives

Danone needed to set up a streamlined process to minimize redundancies across business ventures and improve the customer experience for thousands. The team realized that the only way forward was Automation.

The key objectives identified included –

• Increasing the accuracy and efficiency of the process
• Ensuring better inspection of A/R operations.
• Enabling faster A/R processing.
• Minimizing manual intervention thereby minimizing costs.

The Solution

Danone implemented a Cash Application solution which proved to be time-saving and resolved the impending issues related to the traditional cash process.

The key features included –

• Multi-ERP and Bank File Integration: integrates multiple ERPs and bank file formats.
• Email Parsing: automatically parses emails and their attachments to collect and process remittance information.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): AI-enabled OCR feature automatically extracts remittance information from check images.
• Web Aggregation Capability: Web-based technology logs into website portals to download and obtain remittance information.
• Automatic EDI Parsing: parses all formats of EDI files, including EDI 823, EDI 820, 812, bank BAI, and BAI2 formats.
• Code Deduction Management: identifies, matches, and apply code deductions with specific reason code.

Results and Benefits

With an automated Cash application solution, Danone

• Achieved 95% hit-rate for Cash Application.
• Reduced bank keying Fees by 90%.
• Improved productivity by 75%.
• Enabled same day cash posting.
• Improved customer experience.

Once the solution was implemented across one business unit, the implementation across the other entities was swift.

With AI under the hood, learn more about how Danone implemented their cash application solution and enabled 95% straight through cash-posting.