The new normal will be challenging businesses worldwide for years to come. Instead of focusing on revenue growth, most companies are just trying to find new ways to serve their customers and somehow survive the current crisis.
Now is the time to start evaluating the operational efficiency of the Order to Cash components of your business: are there areas of your end to end process that need attention? Companies that have grown organically with line of business diversity or through merger and acquisition activity often find redundant technologies, data and processes throughout the enterprise, resulting in inflated costs and a lack of top down visibility of customer revenue.
• In finance operations, it is common to find multiple billing systems often managing multiple accounts receivables balances for the same customer.
• Your customers may have complained about receiving multiple invoices for different products and services in the same billing period.
• Customers may also send just one payment with the assumption that your systems will have the ability to apply the correct portion of the payment to the multiple accounts with your company.
• Manual intervention can easily be ignored as a cost and in some cases viewed as part of an automated process.
The ability to provide a complete view of your customers across all products and services starts with the requirements for flexible consolidation of Accounts Receivable, enabling line of business differentiation and holistic visibility simultaneously within a single notion of customer. This then becomes the foundation for the ability to converge invoice processing from all billing streams. Whether a customer gets one invoice or multiple then becomes a business decision, rather than a system limitation, taking advantage of a single platform to manage the processes enterprise wide. As best practices mandate the minimization of human touches, a “lights out” process should be the goal, only intervening when exceptions are generated by the technology. The benefits of these two initiatives will in turn positively impact your payment and collection processes, reducing overall costs while improving customer satisfaction.
For more information on how SAP can help with your
Optimization initiative
Want to read more of this blog-post series? Please find more knowledge here:
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#2 Start Small, Plan Big: How to Embrace Successfully the World of Subscriptions
#3 Transform your business for Revenue Growth amid Covid19 crisis
#4 – Our First Virtual SAP BRIM Conference – Some Highlights
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