Case Study: King UK

Brief

King UK is the UK's leading supplier of all non food products used by every type of outlet, from pubs and restaurants, canteens and hotels to nursing homes, schools, leisure centers and offices. King operates from 16 regional locations and depots strategically located throughout the UK, all supported by the most modern 40,000 sq. m distribution hub at Rugby. King UK coordinates over 12,000 customer contacts each day. They stock over 14,000 different products, including a core product range of the 2,500 most commonly used non food products and beverages in catering, the licensed trade, leisure and education. King’s commitment is to provide unsurpassed service levels, reliability, flexibility, product choice and value for money that is second to none.

Here was the business process before our solution was implemented:

• Between 50,000 and 100,000 invoice payments to be processed each month.
• Customers that pay over 10,000 invoice records in one payment.
• Mega Customers that aggregate payments for multiple customers and send them to you directly as one specific payment.
• Electronic Direct Debit requirements for over 1200 customers.
• Over 100,000 cash transactions to reconcile per year.
• A system change which meant they were required to remove year’s worth of in-house development and go with a standard ERP solution.

Solution

King UK implemented a number of Cashbook’s solutions to solve their high volume scenario. They started with Cashbook journal entry, and then implemented our bank reconciliation module combined with an automatic bank statement upload from their local bank.

King UK implemented Customer Direct Debits to enable automation by electronic funds transfer of cash inbound reducing their DSO.

King UK then modified Cashbook’s Lockbox solution to create a custom cash solution enabling King UK to create a “Customer Hierarchy” to overlay over King UK’s ERP system. This enables 500+ customers to be “joined” ensuring payment data from customers matched with King UK’s accounts receivable data. This solution needed to be maintainable by the AR staff at King UK. The initial implementation included EDI files only but the solution’s success meant that it was expanded to enable Excel files to be automatically processed through Cashbook.

The key features of the solution are:

• Comes with Standard Excel Remittance Layout
• Layout can also be customised to include specific reference data.
• Customer Hierarchy solution enables joining of customer data so that your companies ERP reflects the reality of your accounts receivable data.
• Solution can be deployed across companies.
• Solution handles short-payments, unapplied cash, deductions, and discount & bank charges.
• Works across multiple companies, currencies and environments

Results

Key benefits of this project included:

• Without our automated solution it was identified that six extra resources would be required.
• Our Lockbox solution processed 400,000+ invoices automatically annually since 2005.
• 20,000 checks have been received annually and processed using Cashbook’s bank deposit slip functionality.
• Solution interfaces with bank reconciliation module.
• Solution updates AR Subledger & General Ledger.
• Project was expanded to include Cash & Checks received from Truck drivers at Distribution depots in 2006.

Customer Comment: