Case Study: UGN USA

Brief

Founded in 1986, and with headquarters in Tinley Park, Illinois, UGN USA has become a market leader in high quality parts for acoustic, interior trim and thermal management products serving the Japanese transplant automotive industry in North America.

Historically UGN was dealing with high volume remittance information coming from their four main customers: Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi.

Prior to the implementation of SAI’s Cashbook solution, UGN had to engage in a very laborious manual cash application process based on remittance files received and applied manually. The objective of this project was to reduce the amount of processing time and improve the quality of real-time cash data in the ERP system.

Here was the business process before the solution was implemented:

• Labor intensive ACR500 was being used to process cash
• Users were getting files in a paper-based method only.
• Payment files from customers were being received which related only to references in Future3 (no invoice information was provided).
• The IT department told the finance users that no automated

Solution

The Cashbook EDI Upload solution was used to automatically upload remittance files into the ERP system. The next step was to automate the cash application of the data contained in each file, comparing with open invoices on A/R. A combination of different data fields was used for each file. Exceptions were also handled through Cashbook and the objective was to drive the processing time needed for each file.

A particularity of this project is that each manufacturer used a slightly different set of fields when referencing payments. Moreover, in some cases manufacturers were referencing a field value outside the actual ERP. Some of the data was coming for a third-party automotive supply-chain application Future3. Cashbook was customised to search on traditional ERP invoice data as well as Future3 references also held within the system and referred to in the remittance files.

The key features of the solution are:

• Can be used for any type of EDI file.
• Especially relevant in high-invoice volume scenarios.
• Is highly configurable different algorithms can be added for a minimal cost as the additional algorithms go into core product.
• Enables the handling of deductions, short-payments, unallocated cash received.
• Is a multi-customer, multi-company solution.

Results

Key benefits of this project included:

• Processing days were reduced from 4.5 days to 1 day.
• Electronic customer files were requested and received from large trading partners.
• Local IT department consolidated EDI files to make the data easier to work with.
• Module was successfully implemented with Cashbook, bank reconciliation and electronic payments.
• UGN recommended this solution to sister company Rieter who also implemented successfully in 2007.

Customer Comment: