Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. is an American soft drink company, based in Plano, Texas. Formerly called Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, on May 5, 2008, it was spun off from Britain’s Cadbury Schweppes, with trading in its shares starting on May 7, 2008. DPSG operates 22 manufacturing and bottling facilities with more than 19,000 employees. Rapid Continuous Improvement became part of DPSG culture but made it difficult to impact outsourced processes. A/R improvements were stagnant and variation was the enemy. With a proactive collections management facilitated by HighRadius, DPSG was able to insource, standardize and automate end-to-end credit-to-cash processing.

Elevated Business Challenges with Outsourced Operations

• Outsourced Financial Services: DPSG relied on third-party vendors for their Accounts Receivable operations. This led to limitations such as restricted access and control. Moreover, outsourced contracts prevented shifting to other platforms or discontinuation of services prior to the contract period
• Reduced Transparency: Lack of metrics and statistics made it difficult to tracking outsourced resource productivity
• Absence of Standardized Processes: This led to inconsistencies across processes and created complications for the A/R team

Bottlenecks in Transforming a Complicated Receivables Process

• Rigorous training process: Analysts required continuous training and re-training to stay up-to-date with a highly non-standardized process
• Hesitation in Adoption: Parts of the team were driven by a culture of ?that?s how we have always done it?
• Other Challenges:
  • Manual Correspondence: Majority of A/R correspondence was either mailed or printed/scanned/emailed
  • Broken System of Record: No centralized system for analyst notes on receivables transactions
  • No Worklists: Inability to help analysts prioritize work across collections

About the Collections Solution

The biggest pain point faced by the Collections teams was that they were strapped for time to cover all critical and important accounts. Hence, DPSG wanted a solution that could eliminate non-value tasks through automation.

• Implementation of Collection Strategies: Ability to deploy standard collection strategies across all collectors, meant that the team could connect with the right accounts in a timely manner.
• Automated Correspondence: Automating email and fax correspondence to less-critical accounts significantly reduced the number of manual actions required by the collector, while reducing the size of the collector worklist.
• Data-based Customer Prioritization: Rich data-based scoring of accounts helped collectors prioritize accounts thereby always focusing on important and at-risk customers.
• Visual Metrics: Easy-to-access reports and dashboards enabled team leads and managers to quickly spot trends and take corrective actions.
• Process Discipline: Applying a standardized protocol for different collection teams helped establish process discipline across operations.

Results Across the Board