Winners’ Chronicles – Success Stories From Mid-Sized Businesses With SAP ERP

Ivanti is a Utah-based IT software company that connects industry-leading unified endpoint management, zero trust security and service management solutions to provide a single pane of glass for enterprises to secure and heal devices, and service end users.

Testimonial

“The system did all the heavy lifting; it was reaching out to every customer. And it was pretty amazing, to see all these customers reaching out, wanting to pay bills, wanting to get it resolved, instead of my people having to hunt them. Didn’t matter what amount was the invoice, everyone was getting contacted.”
-Tony Hiatt, Global Credit Manager, Ivanti

Challenges

Completely Manual Processes 

Over 50% of the analyst’s time was spent just dialing for dollars, writing emails, and dealing with escalations.

Limited Visibility into End-To-End Processes

Ivanti did not use any form of centralized repository for tracking reminders, emails, notes, or P2Ps. There was also no visibility for Csuite members to analyze the performance of their business units. These reports also had to be generated manually.

No Standardized Strategy for Work List Prioritization

With no customer prioritization list in place, Ivanti lacked focus on strategizing accounts, which impacted the entire receivables aging.

Cultural and Language Barriers

With customers present worldwide, Ivanti faced issues with conforming to the local norms of correspondence.

How HighRadius helped?

Automated Capture and Recording of Customer Calls, Notes, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) 

The solution pulls and stores information from calls, emails and other correspondence, saving analysts’ time for more critical tasks.

AI Driven Prioritized Work Lists

The solution used AI to provide accurate predictions of customers’ payment commitments and used that information to create worklists for analysts to use, filtering customers by risk.

Auto Extraction of Invoices and Tracking

The solution helps extract information and invoices from correspondences directly and provides real-time tracking insights into payments.

Increased Visibility

With dashboards recording performance, the solution helped Ivanti track critical metrics like the KPIs of employees.

Easy Access and User Friendly

The solution is intuitive, making it easy to use and provides user support in multiple languages.

ShurTech Brands, LLC, markets do-it-yourself tapes, office and housewares products. The company is a subsidiary of Shurtape Technologies, LLC, Hickory, N.C., an industry-leading producer of pressure sensitive masking, duct, packaging and specialty tape products, with facilities in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Peru, United Arab Emirates and China.

Testimonial

“We started seeing immediate results upon implementation: 100%+ efficiency gain!”
-Marinko Marijolovic,Director Corporate Credit Services, ShurTech

Challenges

Slow Output and poor Customer Experiences 

ShurTech had a credit and AR team manually handling all processes including collections and deductions. With the expanding business and mounting receivables, manual efforts did not yield the best results.

Collections

1. Poor customer experience for large customers due to manual prioritization of list
2.  Lack of visibility in tracking, planning, and execution of customer correspondence that was done manually through emails, fax, and calls
3. No centralized repository of notes, their SAP allowed only item level notes. Unreliable Ad Hoc reminders from spreadsheets and Outlook

Deductions

1.  Time Consuming manual research for collecting back up documents
2. All ShurTech deductions below $250 were written off due to resource crunch
3. Unstructured cross departmental workflow and approval

How HighRadius helped?

Deductions Management

Claim and POD Backup Automation

The solution pulls claim and POD information from customer and retailer websites as well as emails and paper documents.

Correspondence Automation

Based on the resolution outcome, analysts are able to automate denial and approval correspondence to the customer.

Deduction Resolution Workflows

The solution provides a structured workflow for approvals or any inter-department collaboration.

Collections Management

Prioritized Collections and Strategy 

Using an automated prioritization system meant that collectors could receive algorithmically generated account lists to collect from based on standardized rules and strategies.

Automated Correspondence 

Collectors could focus on calling high-value or high-risk accounts while automating the bulk of the dunning with templates.

Increased Managerial Visibility 

All collector activity could now be recorded in a single place versus using notepads and spreadsheets.

The American subsidiary of Japanese Yaskawa Electric Corporation, Yaskawa is the world’s largest manufacturer of AC Inverter Drives, Servo and Motion Control, and Robotics Automation Systems.

Testimonial

“With the kind of growth we were experiencing, with the demand for better cash flow and zero budget for additional headcount, we understood that without automating it was very difficult to attain our goals.
-Elizabeth Chamorro, Credit Manager, Yaskawa America Inc

Challenges

 Collections

1. Prioritization of worklists was done manually by individual analysts
2. Information such as past due invoices and promises to pay was retrieved manually from excel files
3. There were inadequate tools for reporting and monitoring

Payments

1. Often had late or no payments or credit card shipments
2. PCI DSS compliance to store credit card data was costly

Disputes

1. Disputes related information was scattered in siloes
2. There was no standard workflow for dispute resolution
3. Siloed processes resulted in time being wasted in collaboration

The Impact On AR

1. Time wasted in manually resolving disputes instead of productive tasks like credit analysis
2. Small dollars were ignored resulting in monetary loss
3. Manager could not measure analysts’ output

How HighRadius helped?

SAP FSCM Implementation

1. Out of the Box Collections and Dispute modules
2. 12 week Implementation Cycle
3. Integration of business partners into FSCM posed the biggest challenge
4. Two collection profiles, Three collection strategies
5. Third party correspondence packages. No need to be a programmer. Create correspondences on the fly

Automated Correspondence Accelerator

1. The accelerator gave the ability to send all correspondence from one centralized location and keep a track of the correspondence sent. They were able to create standard letters and rules for correspondence
2. Customized correspondence templates
3. Auto-trigger based on invoice age
4. Record all account correspondence

J. Keller & Associates, Inc. is a publisher and service organization, providing a wide spectrum of regulatory and information products and services to customers regulated by the Department of Transportation, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and more than 300 state agencies.

Testimonial

“We have come a long way with HighRadius. They have really helped us with the manual work and with the business growing, that’s definitely helping us to move forward.”
-Vicky Klassen, Credit and A/R Manager, J.J. Keller

Challenges

Implementation Strategy

1. Maximize automation with SAP as a base
2. Low total cost of ownership with cloud solutions and SaaS
3. Minimal dependence on IT team for maintenance and upgrades

Collections Management

1. Increasing volumes
2. Limited resources
3. Current process pitfalls

Cash Application

1. Error prone manual work
2. No means for accurate customer identification
3. Deduction coding and identifying discounts

Credit Management

1. Managing volume
2. Manual aggregation of credit reports and data
3. Reactive credit process

How HighRadius helped?

Collections

1. Customer segments
2. Collections strategies
3. Customer call log for notes, promises to pay, and dispute cases
4. Prioritized accounts
5. Rule-based correspondence
6. Letter templates
7. Business managed letters

Cash Application

1. Remittance auto-capture
2. Intelligent invoice matching
3. Ability to link remittances to payments based on Invoice number, PO number, order number & reference
   number
4. Automated short-payment identification & deduction coding

Credit Management

1. Integrated internal and external alerts
2. Single-screen access to all information: credit review, group review, business partner review, new business opportunity review, etc.
3. Automated workflow for approval and reviews

EBSCO Information Services is the leading provider of information resources for institutions including discovery, journal and e-package services, research databases, e-books and more.

Testimonial

EBSCO already had an effective cash application process in place with multiple business process improvement consultants helping us out. It was difficult to imagine that any provider could improve that beyond what it already was.
-Carolyn Etress, Director of Accounts Receivable, EBSCO

Challenges

Manual Processing of Electronic Payments

1. Completely manual processing of electronic payments via ACH, wire, and credit cards
2. Manual aggregation of remittance information from emails, EDI files, and 45 different customer portals

Manual Deductions Identification and Coding

1. Short payments account for 25% of all payments
2. Manual identification, coding, and reason code mapping of short payments imposing difficult weekly cash reconciliation

Receivables Landscape

1. Receivables for more than 35,000 active customers across all sizes and business models
2. Cash reconciliation for approximately 240,000 invoices annually
3. Payments processing across checks (52%), ACH and wire (46%) and credit cards (2%)
4. Deduction coding and reason code mapping for short payments that account for 25% of all payments

How HighRadius helped?

Custom Configurations to Meet Business Requirements

The automated solution enables customizations to handle specific business needs using artificial intelligence-based algorithms. Complex cash application issues such as remittance with non invoice reference numbers or truncated invoice numbers, payments made by alternate payers, cross ERP cash postings, payments made by a parent company for multiple child business units, and buyer group payments can be automated by custom configurations.

Ease of Use and Scalability of SaaS Solution

The cloud-based SaaS solution integrates seamlessly with the system and works with minimal intervention on a plug-and-play model with the existing process and near-zero dependence on the internal IT team.

Automated Deductions Coding

The cash application solution identifies and auto-creates deductions, captures deduction information such as claim number and reason codes, and maps customer reason codes to ERP specific reason codes.