Ferrero Sees Drop in DSO from an All-Time Peak: How Collections Transformation Made that Happen

Surpassing the F&B Industry DSO Benchmarks

85% Collections Effectiveness Index(CEI) achieved.
33% reduction in Average Days Delinquent(ADD).
8% increase in the amount of Promise-to-Pays(P2P) created.
1000+ hrs of time saved every year through auto correspondence.

Cash Application

Collections

Credit

Deductions

Business Transformation Stories

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.

Kay Rogers
Vice President North America Financial Transactions
Ferrero

Challenges

How did HighRadius help

Impact

Benchmarking Reports Indicated Ferrero's DSO being 30% Higher than Industry Standards

With an increasing customer base and operating from several business units, Ferrero faced three significant challenges:

Tracking Receivables Became Difficult with the Increase in Customer Base

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.

Manual Collections Processes Led to Longer Collection Cycles

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.

Information Silos led to a Lack of Visibility into Key Performance Metrics

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.

ABOUT FERRERO

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.

HEADQUARTERS

Alba, Piedmont, Italy

INDUSTRY

Food & Beverages

REVENUE

€ 12.3 billion

PRODUCTS

Credit
Cash Application
Collections
Deductions

Goals & Objectives

The Search for a One-Stop Platform to Streamline Receivables

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.

Improving Receivables Predictability by Moving from a Reactive to Proactive Collections System

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.

Goodbye to Grunt Work

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.

The customers are segmented based on the collections strategy defined by Ferrero, considering parameters such as overdue invoice amounts, payment terms, among others.
Ferrero’s customers are scored on a daily basis and a priority is assigned to each customer according to the score.
Based on the score, each customer is assigned a priority, and a worklist is generated for reaching out to them.

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.

The Single Source of Truth

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.