Thanks to CashOnTime, we’ve achieved a 96% automatic lettering rate on very heavy month-end days. This is an exceptional help.
What does Groupe RG do?
Founded in 1987 (sales 195 million euros, 460 employees) and headquartered in Saint-Priest (69), this group is a leader in the specialized distribution of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Present in France through a network of some thirty sales outlets, it also operates internationally (Spain, Tunisia, Germany, Italy and Belgium).
Currently managed by a pension fund, it has grown externally by acquiring companies positioned in the same sector. The new range of class 3 protective equipment, requiring full training and apprenticeship, has brought a notion of service provision to its customers, mainly professionals from major accounts (SNCF, Veolia, Safran, etc.) and institutions (Paris City Hall).
How do you manage the arrival of several thousand transfers at the end of the month?
Credit manager Gâelle Poulain explains how the CashOnTime accounting lettering solution has streamlined her processes.
Impossible to channel transfers with SAP
Initially, the department (comprising 3 people at the time) did not have a dedicated tool for processing credit transfers. We had to work directly on SAP processes, which were sometimes quite cumbersome. Gäelle Poulain explains: “On certain days, with very high volumes and very large customers who pay invoice by invoice, with identified invoice numbers, and everything falling on the 30th of the month, the department could receive 2,500 transfers!
However, SAP is not adapted to lettering, which was carried out as we went along, i.e. in about 50 seconds per transfer, the time it took to search for the document in an account that could contain up to 3,000 invoices. Even when sorted by amount or document number, the process remained very time-consuming, without adding much value to the work, which kept a full-time person busy for almost a day.
Benchmark highlights CashOnTime’s strengths
A benchmark was therefore carried out in 2019, slowed down because of Covid, then reactivated in early 2021 to find a solution to the monthly bottlenecks.
Gäelle Poulain explains: “We were helped in our approach by an external consultant who presented us with three solutions. We compared services and budgets, and quickly decided on CashOnTime, which was much more efficient and gave us better control over our costs.
What’s more, our CFO was already familiar with a previous DIMO Software lettering solution. The solution met with unanimous approval within the 5-person project group”. After signing the contract in February, production went live in October 2021, which Gäelle Poulain considers to be a fairly rapid timetable.
Benefits: an undeniable ROI
The IT teams were assisted by an external consultant who carried out several SAP parameterizations.
There was no disruption to SAP’s flow during implementation, which was therefore fairly smooth despite some turnover concerns within the cash-in-transit department. In this respect, the three half-day training sessions prior to implementation were very useful.
Since October 2021 and the implementation of CashOnTime, 58,000 automatic lettering operations have been carried out, with a rate of 82%. The service processes around 100,000 transactions a year.
“In the end, we made huge savings in processing time and divided our FTE (Full Time Equivalent) by 2. From the user’s point of view, it’s quite easy to get to grips with the solution, which is very ergonomic. Thanks to CashOnTime, we’ve achieved a 96% automatic lettering rate on very heavy days. It’s an exceptional help. But we also appreciate the tool for transfers of 15 to 20 invoices. We can inject part numbers quite easily. We work a lot with PDF files transferred to Excel. We can then insert these Excel files quite easily into CashOnTime, which is very practical.
Future projects
Artificial intelligence enables one-click automatic lettering of PDF transfer advices (CashOnTime’s Large Payer module). This point will be reviewed in the medium term. For the time being, CashOnTime is used to smooth transactions over the month. “As soon as we receive information from the banks for commercial transfers (vcom), we’ll put them in announcements so that, when they fall a few weeks later, the lettering can be done automatically”.
Complex credit transfers (around 80 on a standard day) continue to be processed manually. On large bi-weekly days, there can still be as many as 250. We still make too little use of the Paymaster function, but we intend to remedy this in the medium term,” says Ms Poulain, adding: “The group’s other entities are outside the CashOnTime scope for lettering. Some are not on SAP or handle smaller volumes. However, we are keeping open the possibility of opening up to one or two additional companies.
Keys to success to share
For Gaëlle Poulain, it’s vital to assess all the types of payment to be processed, and to estimate the time required for parallel tasks as accurately as possible. For example, the collection department handles over 90% of bank transfers, but there are still many payments by cheque, commercial paper and, increasingly, bank cards. These are all time-consuming processes: in fact, cheque and bill remittance is time-consuming, and SAP remains quite cumbersome, as the tool requires several transactions.
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