Healthier Lives, Happier Homes

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

CASH APPLICATION | ELECTRONIC INVOICING | DEDUCTIONS

Integrated Receivables for Happier Credit & A/R Learn how Reckitt Benckiser leveraged artificial intelligence within the A/R solution to process $15B receivables at zero additional cost

We operate on a completely intelligent Integrated Receivables platform that can eliminate application siloes, make information sharing seamless and automatic.

Roberto Rettore, Trade Investment Director, Reckitt Benckiser

Paper Based System Unscalable Processes About Reckitt Benckiser Reckitt Benckiser started with a paper-based system for all Reckitt Benckiser Group plc is a British multinational consumer goods company. its A/R processes, including deductions, cash application, World’s largest producer of health, hygiene, and invoicing. With a growing business and exponentially and home products. Formed in 1999 by the increasing volume of receivables and electronic payments, merger of the UK-based Reckitt & Colman plc Reckitt Benckiser faced a number of issues: and the Netherlands-based Benckiser NV. RB's brands include the antiseptic brand Dettol, • The cost of printing for a paper-based system was the sore throat medicine Strepsils, the hair gradually increasing with the growing business. removal brand Veet, the immune support supplement Airborne, the air freshener Air Wick, • Paper invoicing for all customers was a time-consuming, Calgon, Clearasil, Cillit Bang, Durex, Lysol, Mycil, costly process with no mechanism for tracking. and Vanish. • Broken customer experience for the large, strategic customers who wanted EDI support for their processes Headquarters: Slough, England, UK Revenue: £11,512 billion (2017) • Productivity was lost in low-value tasks like collecting Industry: Consumer goods backup documents and printing them. Number of employees: 35,000 • Difficult cross-department collaboration Products: Cleaning products, healthcare • No single point of truth or accountability across all the products, Condiments, and Personal care processes products Business Challenges Long Term Vision: • Receivables volume was growing Simplified IT Landscape with • Electronic payments were increasing • EDI adoption was more prominent Cleaner A/R Yet, the Credit and A/R team of Reckitt With scalability and efficiency being the major driving Benckiser was not ready to deal with the force, the Credit and A/R team envisioned a solution changing scenario across all its processes with several features : including deductions, cash application, invoicing, and credit. With their analysts still • A system that can leverage automation to eliminate manually working on the paper-based system the repetitive low value manual tasks. without any structured workflow for collaboration or approval , Reckitt Benckiser • Solution that can enforce tight ERP integration to turned to HighRadius Integrated Receivables maintain a strong, single source-of-truth platform to support their growing business • A simplified IT landscape with a solution that needs. worked across all A/R processes

CASH APPLICATION | ELECTRONIC INVOICING | DEDUCTIONS

Results Across the Board

50% YoY 98% cost 77% Reduction savings saving With FTE reallocation On electronic invoicing Average days to resolve deductions

95% cash applied 100% deductions automatically coded automatically Without human intervention Due to smarter engine

About the Solutions

With the entire gamut of A/R processes working on paper based-system, Reckitt Benckiser wanted to transcend to a different level of automation suitable to curb all it’s A/R issues

Deduction Management Billing and Payments Teams were not able to spend as much time on actual Cost and resources were lost in print and mail billing and research. This problem was solved by: payment acceptance.

1. Claim and POD Backup Automation: The solution is 1. Automated Print and Mail Invoicing: The solution able to pull claim and POD information from enabled automation of print and mail at a customer and retailer websites as well as emails and significantly lower cost than the in-house process. paper documents. It is also able to link the 2. Self-service portal: This portal served as the single- documents to the relevant dispute cases. stop for customers to access billing information and 2. Correspondence Automation: Based on the make payments via ACH or credit cards. resolution outcome, analysts are able to automate the 3. Customer Dispute Cases: Customers were also able to denial and approval correspondence to the customer. use the portal to create dispute cases.

Cash Application To manage the increasing volume of receivables and the growing trend of electronic payments and EDI adoption, the team used the following features:

1. Automatic Linking Engine: An intelligent pattern-matching and transformation engine that applies customer specific procedures for invoice matching, deduction identification and coding, and cash discount analysis. 2. Optical Character Recognition: A built-in OCR engine captures data from check remittances. 3. Data Aggregation Engine: Aggregate payment and remittance details from a variety of sources o EDI Aggregation: Support for EDI 823, EDI 820, 812, bank BAI or BAI2 formats. o Web Aggregation: A web-based technology that collects information from websites. o Email Aggregation: Automatically parses emails and their attachments to collect and process remittances

We wanted to have a simplified IT landscape, one solution to work on entire A/R.

Roberto Rettore, Trade Investment Director, Reckitt Benckiser