Reimagining Cash Application Across Danone’s Shared Services

75% Reduction in Overall Costs
25% Reduction in Days Deductions Outstanding (DDO)
100% Touchless Cash Processing
$5.9M recovered post-Shared Service Center set up in Canada in 5 months
Smooth ERP Integration with Existing Systems

Cash Application Cloud

Collections Cloud

Deductions Cloud

Business Transformation Stories

We were able to redeploy some of those employees to focus on collecting back invalid deductions. So actually, after about five months of going live, we were able to click close to $6 million back in value.

Jacob Whetstone
Director,
Credit & Accounts Receivable

Challenges

How did HighRadius help

Impact

Days Deduction Outstanding of 45+ Days Negatively Impacted the Bottom Line

With operations extended across 130 countries, Danone faced some core challenges around its A/R shared services setup:

Lack of Standardized Processes

Danone’s growing business lines with an ever-expanding receivables portfolio meant processes were highly manual and not standardized, resulting in higher resource count and growing difficulty in adding local preferences to systems.

Working Capital Bottlenecks Due to Lack of Visibility

Danone lacked a centralized view of its A/R performance due to multiple siloed systems. They needed to address these bottlenecks to start focusing on more high-value tasks, while simultaneously improving their customer-client relationships.

Increased Process Complexity and Lack of Operational Excellence

Danone’s global presence coupled with a vast customer base resulted in some challenges in their day-to-day operations.

They had more than 25 portals for collecting remittances and multiple lockboxes spanning geographics that increased the workload of their cash application process, which was 100% manual.
Deductions management was also completely manual. Delays in deductions resolution increased the DDO to more than 45 days.
The collectors dealt with mundane, repetitive tasks, including customer segregation and creating promises-to-pays (P2Ps), rather than prioritizing at-risk accounts that required dunning.

ABOUT DANONE

Danone, a leading global food-product provider, delivers to diverse customer segments consisting of more than 1000 food distributors including Walmart and Amazon. With its geographically distributed operations, Danone has Shared Services for its Accounts Receivable (A/R) present across its multiple business units.

INDUSTRY

Consumer Goods

HEADQUARTERS

Paris, France

REVENUE

€3.3 Billion (2020)

PRODUCTS

Cash Application Cloud
Collections Cloud
Deductions Cloud

We wanted a single source of truth. We needed a system that was easily deployable and customizable with the flexibility to integrate with our existing systems. Above all, we needed minimal IT intervention on our part.

Jacob Whetstone
Director, Credit & Accounts Receivable
Danone

Positive Working Capital Impact Supplemented by 75% Increase in Productivity

Danone partnered with HighRadius to standardize its global Order-to-Cash (O2C) processes while leveraging automation to enable greater operational efficiency.

Harmonized Global Processes with an End-to-End O2C Platform

With the HighRadius cloud solution, Danone achieved standardized processes across its business units and evolved into a target operating model.

Achieved 25 Days Reduction in DDO Generating Positive Working Capital Impact

With the HighRadius deductions solution, Danone gained better visibility into the process and automated the deduction resolution while reducing the DDO by 25 days.

75% Increase in Productivity by Driving Operational Excellence through Continuous Improvement

Supported by HighRadius cloud solutions, Danone improved its staff utilization and optimized operating costs by automating its A/R processes. The cloud solutions employed seamlessly integrated with their existing ERP solutions to trigger invalid deduction workflows for collectors, helping them recover more than $6 million in about five months of going live with the implementation.