Case Study: Impress

Brief

Impress is a market leader in food product aluminium packaging generally; in particular, it has a leading position in aluminium packaging for seafood products. Impress is also a European market leader in food and other consumer products metal packaging, with particular strengths in packaging for decorative and protective finishes and baby foods, which are areas of the market which require a high degree of customisation and special convenience features. Impress Shared Services is based in Deventer, in the east of The Netherlands, and provides services to operating entities in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK.

Impress operate a multi-country Shared Service center from Deventer in The Netherlands. They process cash of over €1 billion from their single central location. When choosing Cashbook as its European Cash Management partner, it was important to Impress that they could implement an out-of-the-box solution that would accommodate local regional requirements within the Benelux region without compromising their pan European strategy of having a common system in place for all countries.

Here was the business process before our solution was implemented:

• Collection and application of customer cash to open Accounts Receivable records and the input of bank statements into their system completed manually.
• Unallocated cash from customers was greater than 5% of all cash received.
• BPCS ACR500 was used for cash & memo posting which made cash application slow and unwieldy.
• Draft Management was done using a product TRS for France
• Draft Management in Spain was done using a product known as Carteras.
• Electronic payments were completed manually.
• There was no solution to enable automatic direct debits through to the bank from the ERP system.
• There was no common bank used for accounts receivables and accounts payable.

Solution

SAI introduced the Benelux Pack in 1998. This self-contained module is fully compliant with the specific legal, fiscal and reporting requirements within the Benelux region. This Benelux solution enables users to manually key in bank statement transactions within an integrated environment and from a single point of entry, directly apply cash to Accounts Receivable in a highly effective manner. This functionality also accommodates allocations to Accounts Payable as well as Manual (Non AR/AP) Payments and Receipts. The Benelux solution accommodates unique bank statement numbering, bank statement opening/closing balance validation & suspense accounting.

On a daily basis, Impress automatically uploads bank statement information from their European bank. This functionality eliminates all of the manual effort involved in keying this information in by hand and therefore has provided Impress with significant ROI in terms of automation and reduction of labour costs. Many of Impress’ customers pay electronically into the Impress bank account. This receipt information is available on the inbound bank statement file that is uploaded into Cashbook, together with invoice remittance information relating to the documents being paid. The Automated AR Matching solution runs at the time of uploading the bank statement and automatically performs a matching process between inbound receipt information and open AR items. According to Ad Wijten, General Manager of Impress Shared Services, the automated matching rate achieved for some countries is in excess of 80%.

The key features of the solution are:

• Automatically upload bank statements from a chosen bank.
• Work with bank statement transactions to process AP Payments, AR Receipts, miscellaneous transactions and other scenarios.
• Supports algorithms across customer numbers, invoices, sales orders, customer bank accounts, pick list, packing numbers, customer purchase orders, shipment numbers, and sales orders.
• Automatically run a matching process between inbound invoice receipt information and open items on Accounts Receivable.
• Automatically code specific items on the bank statement to chosen general ledger codes (for example bank fees).
• Caters for partial payments, credit/debit notes, unallocated payments, multiple discount terms, foreign exchange gain or losses, write-offs, bank charges, suspense account postings.
• Review Matched and Unmatched Reports and work with exceptions prior to posting back to ERP general ledger & AR subledger.
• Multiple sites, environments or ERP systems can be catered for.

Results

Key benefits of this project included:

• Unallocated cash dramatically reduced.
• Accounts receivable cash application completed by 1.5FTE with turnover in excess of €1 Billion.
• Draft Management, Customer Direct Debits, Automatic bank statement upload & matching all completed through Cashbook.
• Greater knowledge of cash balances & cash Cash Forecasting.

Customer Comment: