Case Study: Premier Grocery Products (Campbell Grocery Products)

Brief

Now part of the Premier Grocery Products group, the Campbell Soup Company founded its UK business in 1933, marketing its well-known range of condensed soups. In 1959 a new plant was opened in King’s Lynn, Norfolk to produce condensed soups for the UK. In the past ten years, the company has grown rapidly through acquiring some of Britain’s favourite food brands. These include Fray Bentos in 1993, Homepride in 1995 and Batchelors and Oxo purchased from Unilever in 2001, which resulted in the business doubling in size. Today, the UK business is the largest in Europe with a turnover in excess of £250 million. The company now employs over 1,000 people in its King’s Lynn, Worksop and Ashford factories, its head office in Cambridge and Research and Development center of excellence at Worksop.

In 1995 Campbell’s purchased Cashbook to automate their financial processes in tandem with their underlying ERP system. They implemented Cashbook to reconcile their bank statements and eventually moved to electronic payments for their vendors removing the costs of printing and posting cheques.

Here was the business process before our solution was implemented:

Electronic payments were used in 95% of all payments.
Paper-based remittances were being printed for over 2000 vendors from around the UK.
Paper-based remittances were being used for employee expenses.
Time & cost savings were required to keep Campbell’s competitive in a challenging industry.

Solution

In 2005, ten years after initially installing Cashbook, Campbell’s upgraded to V4.01 Cashbook and also implemented Bacstel-IP SAI’s Java-based Bacstel-IP solution.

While doing this upgrade Campbell’s decided to change the way they handled paper remittance advice notes for their suppliers. By implementing the Java-based Cashbook’s email remittance solution, the company were able to reduce unnecessary paper printing and posting from their organization.

Now during each payment run, the AP team can generate and send out one email remittance for each supplier payment being made. Information is sent directly to the supplier’s AR contact, with a copy of the email retained internally as a record. In monetary terms, it is estimated that a savings of approximately 75 pence is generated for each email sent out.

The key features of the solution are:

Comes with Standard Cashbook Email Template Layout
Layout can also be customised to include specific reference data
Uses payment data from one or multiple sources (ERP, Payroll application)
Multi-lingual configurable remittance text (based on country code of payee)
Email selection, generation and transmission steps integrate seamlessly with your existing payment process
Works across multiple companies, currencies and environments
Platform-independent, connecting to any email server
Can be used as a standalone application or with Cashbook Electronic Payments

Results

Key benefits of this project included:

Time & cost savings from moving over 1000 vendors onto email remittances. Savings have been estimated at greater than £1000/month.
Reduced phone calls from vendors requesting information about electronic payments.
Better image of Campbell’s – the logo that get’s sent with each email from Campbell’s improves the corporate image.
Copy to functionality has enabled Campbell’s to have the ability to re-send payment information.
Additional reference information has been accommodated to deal with invoice factoring agencies.

Customer Comment:

Kevin Ayres, Campbell’s AP Manager explains the importance of this project: “Campbell’s (now Premier Grocery Products) are continually looking to do things more efficiently. In some companies, finance often gets overlooked by IT because other areas of an organization need overhauling. We are delighted to have gone live with Cashbook Email Remittance and the Java-based Bacstel-IP and we look forward to working with SAI in the years ahead.”