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Kickstarting Global Finance SSC Transformation With Cash Application Automation
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Pharmaceuticals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Intuitive, while newly adopting an SSC operating model, was struggling to cope with a manual & lagging cash application process. True no-touch cash posting rates were below expectation, generating consumer dissatisfaction. Inaccurate tracking of metrics and reports hindered visibility and executive supervision on day-to-day tasks. Manual research & deduction coding were time-consuming and drove an increase in FTEs. Rapid year-on-year growth at Intuitive led to a huge volume of transactions and a lagging cash application. Healthcare companies like Intuitive witness heavy capital expenditure incurred in funding research & manufacturing. Hence, sustaining the business through optimized working capital is crucial for this industry sector. And one of the many ways they seek to accomplish this is by breeding healthy & long-term consumer relationships. But at Intuitive, the delayed cash posting rates posed a major threat to their consumer relations, business with pharmaceutical firms, and infirmaries, who insist on getting their invoices cleared immediately upon payment. Also, the auto-cash posting rate was just 40%, which being inconsistent with the actual rate hindered visibility, further compounding their troubles. For Intuitive, dealing with their European customer segment was another major conundrum. While doing business with the public & government-led hospitals & firms, they often came across exceptional scenarios, which were very hard to tackle even with their existing ERP, banking tools & IT team. Also, having to cater to customer portfolios spread across 15+ countries, Intuitive was liable to accept payments in multiple currencies while conforming to a broad spectrum of payment & trade statutes. The sudden spurt of growth over just a few years at Intuitive led to an unprecedented rise in business demands. But the Banking and A/R management tools in place couldn't meet the automation requirements the business team desired, despite the incurring costs. Hence, they had to thoroughly meet the operational requirements with manual efforts, which often led to Analysts' fatigue. So, as an attempt to ease the heavy workload on the existing manpower, headcounts were further added. However, the manual workforce, although now scaled-up and functioning at a 100% capacity, failed to keep up with the incremental transaction volumes.
About The Customer
Intuitive Surgical, Inc. is a pioneer and global leader in robotic-assisted, minimally invasive surgery. With a revenue of $5 billion, Intuitive develops, manufactures, and markets the da Vinci surgical system, its flagship product. The company is based in the United States and has a significant presence in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. Intuitive has been expanding its global finance shared service function to achieve a 100% cash posting rate. The company has been facing challenges in managing its cash application process due to rapid growth and the need to handle complex regional currencies and compliance issues. Intuitive's commitment to innovation and operational excellence has driven them to seek automation solutions to improve their financial processes and maintain strong consumer relationships.
The Solution
HighRadius Cash Application solution helped Intuitive improve their auto-cash posting rates and secure operational excellence. The solution enabled 100% touchless cash posting even in the case of exceptional scenarios, missing data, and unfamiliar payment formats. Extensive reporting capabilities helped analyze the productivity of the Cash Application team. Automated deduction coding and remittance match saved time on research and manual aggregation of backup data. Automating Cash Application could enable Intuitive to effortlessly commit to a success measure of 100% improvement globally. Drawing exclusive focus on building consumer relationships could be made possible through a smooth payment experience. Moving the repetitive, rule-based transactions to an automated tool could help them channel their workforce toward more strategic tasks. Automating Cash Application was straightforward and required only a few internal resources. Successful automation of cash application could serve as an incentive for the executives to scale automation on other finance processes. The solution helped auto-match invoices to their respective payments in all global parent-child scenarios. Even the absence of an invoice number didn’t create an issue as the solution could match the invoices based on other references like the sales order number and purchase order number. Besides, it was flexible enough to handle invoices even with truncated reference numbers. The solution also made them capable of managing unique scenarios for high-volume customers confined to the European region. Hence, automating invoice matching even in the most complex business and exceptional scenarios helped Intuitive redress its low cash posting rates. The multi-OCR engine offered by the HighRadius Cash Application solution effortlessly captured accurate and noise-free remittance data from multiple sources simultaneously. Web bots deployed by the engine helped them auto-extract data securely from across customer portals, reducing manual efforts and simplifying the entire process. The solution automatically helped them map the customer-provided reason codes with internal ERP-specific reason codes without any human intervention. The out-of-the-box reporting capabilities offered them seamless executive visibility and let them conveniently keep tabs on the overall productivity across all their global operations. The solution also ensured easy remittance linking across all incoming payments, irrespective of the payment format, bank file format, remittance format, language, or currency.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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