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.
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.
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 –
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 –
With an automated Cash application solution by HighRadius, Danone
Once the solution was implemented across one business unit, the implementation across the other entities was swift.
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HighRadius Cash Application Software enables the end-to-end automation of the cash application process that covers major benefits such as AI-enabled data capture for remittances, auto-linking of payments with open invoices, cost-cutting on lockbox fees and easy compatibility with any system due to its ERP-agnostic Saas infrastructure. Apart from the major benefits that it has, there are some key features which can not be missed out, some of them are Email Remittance capture, Discounts and Deductions Handling, Check Remittance Capture, Web Remittance Capture, Invoice Matching, and RDC & Mobile Payments.