Challenges
With such a massive volume of customers and operating from several business units, Ferrero faced three significant challenges that made them switch to integrated receivables:
Lack of Executive Visibility
Finance executives had limited visibility across business units because of the decentralized system in place. They were also unable to monitor important accounts or have a holistic view of customer data to enable smarter decision making.
Inability to take Real-Time Action
With siloed systems, the A/R team was failing to take real-time actions. There was no flow of information between the systems and various departments. There was also a lack of inter-team visibility regarding customer communication.
Poor Customer Risk Management
The lack of inter-team visibility obstructed them from making better decisions and enforcing customers’ rules falling into various risk segments.
How did Integrated Receivables Help?
Ferrero improved its overall A/R efficiency by leveraging the HighRadius integrated receivables solution. Read below to learn how exactly an integrated system enabled inter-team collaboration and better visibility to bring significant changes to the order to cash process overall:
Enabling Better Visibility for the Senior Management
With a centralized system in place, enabling visibility across levels, it was easy to share working capital reports, and a major accounts overview with executives. With real-time visibility into working capital reports and a summary of important accounts, they could make faster decisions. The above thus helped the company survive and thrive in the economic downturn.
The reporting focused on high-value and high-risk accounts, their past-dues, and balances with intelligent risk forecasting. Quick identification of at-risk accounts reduced lousy debt and enabled management to make strategic decisions based on the risk.
Remote Workforce Enablement and Management
Through the integrated system, the company gained visibility into any factors contributing to a change in KPIs. Aggregated information from multiple sources was used to make informed decisions, thus enabling Ferrero to maintain existing KPIs, which were better than industry averages.
Balancing Customer Expectations and Business Objectives
The system automatically identified customers with real cash flow constraints against those who use the crisis as an excuse to delay payments. This, in turn, led to better customer services for genuinely at-risk accounts.
By identifying at-risk customers and the economic crisis’s impact on different customer segments, the IR system created targeted collection strategies.
