
Highradius reduced the amount of effort required in every process to a bare minimum. It helped the team focus on more important cases which required more human touch, like strategic decision making and creating better relationships with customers.
With an increasing customer base and operating from several business units, Ferrero faced three significant challenges:
With business growth came new challenges. It became increasingly difficult for the collections team to keep track of critical and past-due customer accounts. With a limited workforce, it was also a hurdle to regularly follow up with customers for timely payments.
The entire collections process was manual. The collections team would periodically review each account and prioritize the customers to contact based on when the payment was overdue. After prioritizing the worklist, the team would follow up with the customers through email. The dunning process was slow and manual, with time lost in building customer lists, sending emails, tracking promise-to-pays and notes.
Despite collection analysts spending 75% of their time dunning, timely collections were dreadful. The workflow was tedious, inefficient, and unscalable, leading to longer collection cycles.
With multiple siloed systems for credit, invoicing, cash posting, deductions, and collections management, tracking customers’ data was challenging. The collection team would consolidate the customer communication notes and documents from various sources, such as the promise-to-pay, reconciliations, and deductions. But there is no central repository for the team to view them.
The information gaps resulted in a lack of coordinated effort between the A/R teams; did not provide account-level visibility for the leadership to take preventive actions.
Ferrero is an Italian manufacturer of chocolate and confectionery products. Founded in 1946, it is the third-largest chocolate confectionery globally and an iconic house of brands with Nutella, Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, and many others under its umbrella. It is present in more than 50 countries, with 31 production plants and about 37000 employees.
Alba, Piedmont, Italy
Food & Beverages
€ 12.3 billion
Credit
Cash Application
Collections
Deductions
By leveraging an automation solution that also unifies the receivables processes, Ferrero wanted to improve collectors’ efficiency, minimize bad debt write-offs, improve customer relationships and thus reduce DSO.
Ferrero implemented an A/R automation suite that connected their receivables teams with their customers. The platform further enhanced information flow between their systems, personnel, and internal and external business partners.
The Collections software helped Ferrero automate its workflows and transition to a proactive collections process by assisting the team in:
Worklist Prioritization- The system automatically identifies accounts at the risk of delinquency based on customer credit scores and collection rules defined by Ferrero.
Analysts could use the worklist to focus their efforts in collections for specific, high-risk customer accounts, while the low-risk accounts correspondence is automated.
Automated Dunning- Analysts can automatically send bulk email correspondence to multiple customers, proactively reminding them about payment dues. The Collections software also allows the analysts to post invoices directly to customer A/P portals. The new process eliminated the need for the collections team to spend time manually corresponding, and uploading invoices.
By integrating multiple order to cash processes such as credit, deductions management, collections, and cash posting, all finance teams have access to aggregated customer data points. It helps increase cohesion between the receivables teams. The application also provides reporting functionality to increase account-level visibility for the leadership team. The transformation increased promise- to-pays from customers, thereby also positively impacting the collection effectiveness metric.
You need an integrated system or a one-stop-shop with all the information in one place. Otherwise, it’s just more effort for you to search for the data from different sources. It gives you a holistic view of the customer data.
Kay Rogers
Vice President North America Financial Transactions
Ferrero