Lisa Tucker 00:04
Thank you. Thanks for the warm applause and welcome. I’m Lisa Packer. I want to thank you for this opportunity to share the Clorox story. As we embark to implement the Highradius cash application module. The collaboration between technology and business teams enabled our success which was the key to a quick stabilization against 3060 and 90-day benchmarks. What we’ll talk about is the Clorox company, the cash application landscape at Clorox, our cash applications challenges that we faced, why we went we chose Highradius and how Highradius has helped us, and the benefits we achieve post-implementation, as well as the best practices towards change management. Clorox is a global CPG company, our goods our products are sold primarily through mass merchandisers, retail outlets, commerce channels, distributors, and medical supply providers.
Lisa Tucker 01:18
Our core explains brands include its namesake leech, glad Hidden Valley chains with Kingsford, charcoal, granite, and first step litter. Some you didn’t know are all under the Clorox umbrella.
Lisa Tucker 01:38
Were also founded in 1913 among the fortune 500 Since 2000, and has production news across 25 companies. The cash
Lisa Tucker 01:54
application landscape at Clorox is 5 million and receivables 3000 invoices generated monthly. We utilized one bank for check remit to tell keen to help prepare payments for application. Across utilizing three full-time application analysts. We were experiencing 45% of manual payment applications by those individuals and spent as much as 55% of the team’s time on payment remit linking activities. So what cash application challenges did we face? But before we proceed, I’d like to ask you to consider the biggest challenge your organization faces in your cash application process of the following is that multiple remittance formats via constraints with your current ERP, three manual exception coding, and SR three see the market visibility. So the poll activity automated poll is not working. So let’s have a show of hands. At your organization. What is your greatest challenge a raise hands for a remittance format? Multiple internet formats
Lisa Tucker 03:19
the constraints with your current ERP. Okay, manual exception code. And do you lack visibility? Okay, great. Thank you for participating. We found a great limitation on our current ERP. It was an obstacle for timely and accurate cash application.
Lisa Tucker 03:51
It was absent of customer-specific configuration rules that automated some of their payment postings. And we had a lot of difficulty with exceptions scenarios. Our ERP was not necessarily compatible with all the different EFT data formats. And as a result, complex EMTs from many of our customers, that is the majority of our payment type method. Those customers had to change to a manual payment application. And that really did take a significant amount of time. processing payments were to do so to do so accurately, we would have to download that data into a spreadsheet run a macro so that we’re more easily format the data that we could upload and then post the payment. At that time when we were looking at where we spent our time. We spent a great deal the team’s manual processes matching payments with remits from emails and going up to customer portals to download limits, as well as matching the EDI data. That was a great deal of our time, as I’ve said previously. So these were some of the different areas where we spent manual time processing payments, deductions. Reason coding is a very tedious process manually. Our ERP cannot be configured to manage that automatically. And our cash analyst had to manually review a recent kind of customer manual in an Excel spreadsheet. Now, over time in many years, they were quite good, remembering what the reason cuts were for every customer. But if we have to onboard a new analyst, it was a painstaking task for them to learn the customer reason code assignment and to refer to an Excel spreadsheet workbook that we maintain. So onboarding new people also presented its challenges. So the question is, why did Clorox choose Highradius? Clark’s folks come out and network with other CPG companies for advice and for recommendations to help us understand what technologies they were using and they were successful with the feedback was very favorable for Highradius, and it came to be clear that the advantages they were experiencing would be a good solution for Clorox, to help move from manual processes and automate our cash application process. automated cash have the patience with Highradius and increased our invoice matching process to auto-link invoices across all payment types, as well as the automated capability to capture remits, from customer portals and emails. And the most important improvement for us was the automated mapping of customer-specific reason codes. So this is by design a very unique capability that takes into account every customer’s behavior and supports that they provide to define the reason codes and the activity that the reason code matches Highradius can configure specifically to each customer. And they did do so benefits were achieved. We moved to an 80% accurate auto-apply where we were at 50%. The other key significant difference is that the exception handling in Highradius is considerably more efficient, and takes a great deal of less time, we experienced with now two full-time employees a 50% capacity gain, for other value-added work. That was also significant for us. It’s the slide that really tells our story, and the success, change management best practices. This was my first implementation to lead a team through change technology change was quite a challenge for me in a totally new territory.
Lisa Tucker 08:38
It is so important to understand your own process and your technology and what you’re looking for, and to prepare your people for change. We knew a year and a half in advance that we were going to go to hybrid NIST. We started small step changes in our daily process and the way we approached work, setting a higher bar, we gained efficiencies and capacities. That further was optimized when we implemented our babies. What we learned is that after 30 days, we applied all unapplied payments 60 and 90, we were stabilizing still learning. It takes time, man new technology and the technology that’s integrating with your ERP. But we were the first client the feedback given tasks that have applied for all unapplied payments in their first 30-day period. That’s our normal expectation. And we were really, really pleased to get that feedback. It gave us a renewed motivation and enthusiasm to see that the implementation this new technology would be a success to update our senior management and provide the progress that we were making. Where it translated to Embrace embrace and adoption of the new technology. And this is why I feel is so key in change management to be successful. People have to buy in, and they have to support it. And to take anyone along the journey that’s resisting as a great demand on your resources to get folks excited about change, I support the change. The process is so much easier. So this is really the slide that gives me the greatest gratification to have been a part of something that typically can be a very frustrating experience. But in our case, we did very well and it was it was a nice reward in of itself. So this concludes our story. Thank you
