DATAMARK Accelerates the Invoice-to-Cash Cycle for a Global Courier

Finance and Accounting Case StudyMay 2014

©2014 DATAMARK, Inc. www.datamark.net

DATAMARK ACCELERATES THEINVOICE-TO-CASH CYCLE FOR A GLOBAL COURIERBackground

Our client is an overnight express courier serving more than 220 countries worldwide. The company’s average shipping volume is approximately 4 million packages daily.

Although our client accounts for many of its deliveries using electronic forms, international package shipping still involves significant processing of paper forms such as air waybills and commercial invoices. Over many years, we have built a successful relationship providing document processing services for this client.

The processing of transportation and logistics documents—particularly at the high volumes experienced by our client—is an ideal function to outsource to a specialist provider such as DATAMARK. Often, these finance and accounting (F&A) tasks, when handled in-house, reach a point where they become an expensive, time-consuming distraction from core business.

This is the situation our client found itself in when it suffered bottlenecks in its in-house process for resolving errors on air waybills and other documents critical to its invoice-to-cash cycle. Frustrated with backlogs that prevented them from billing a significant number of customers in a timely and cost-effective manner, our client turned to DATAMARK for a solution.



The Challenge

The immediate problem our client faced was a backlog of tens of thousands of documents that required corrections before they could be used to invoice customers. Most of the issues involved incorrect or incomplete customer account numbers. Other problem areas included issues with addresses and postal codes and shipment weights.

To correct errors, the client’s agents would access information from a variety of databases. Forms with problems that could not be corrected quickly would be routed to an escalation queue. Our client did not have a standardized process across the organization for resolving errors, which contributed to the delays in billing its customers.

In addition to the need to clear the backlog of documents as soon as possible, our client’s process for correcting errors was in need of a rigorous end-to-end analysis by DATAMARK’s Lean and Six-Sigma-trained process improvement specialists. Wasteful steps needed to be identified and removed, and a documented, standardized system established to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of our client’s error correction process.

The DATAMARK Response

DATAMARK sent a Business Engineering team to our client’s facilities to complete a Business Process Analysis (BPA). The team documented and mapped out the end-to-end billing process and used this information to identify workflow bottlenecks that were contributing to the document processing backlog.

The team developed a clear, step-by-step plan to shift the billing-exception process to DATAMARK’s global facilities. As part of the solution, DATAMARK established consistent and standardized procedures for using our client’s database management systems as research tools for the invoice-to-cash process. A program was established to train DATAMARK staff on the database management systems.

The solution was presented to the client and approved. DATAMARK immediately took steps to train its staff and ramp up production to resolve our client’s most critical problem—the backlog of tens of thousands of transportation documents necessary to bill customers.

“The team developed a

clear, step-by-step plan

to shift the billing-

exception process to

DATAMARK’s global

facilities. As part of the

solution, DATAMARK

established consistent

and standardized

procedures for using our

client’s database

management systems as

research tools for the

invoice-to-cash process.”



The Outcome

We met our project implementation goals and quickly and seamlessly transitioned our client’s process to trained staff at DATAMARK’s global facilities. The backlog of transportation documents was cleared rapidly, allowing our client to bill its customers and improve its cash flow and overall bottom line:

From Backlog to Same-Day Turnaround

With the backlog cleared, DATAMARK teams are now handling 100 percent of our client’s billing-exception process.

We are achieving our goals for same-day error resolution, allowing our client to quickly bill customers and speed up the invoice-to-cash process. Our global team is now resolving account issues on nearly 400,000 shipping forms every month.

Continuous Improvement

Our client’s process is now consolidated, relocated and stabilized, but that doesn’t mean our Business Engineering and Operations teams have stopped looking for ways to deliver process improvements and technological innovations.

Over the course of our long-term partnership with our client, we have made a number of improvements to our client’s logistics management platform to significantly reduce the number of forms that require additional manual processing or attention in error correction and exception queues.

Some recent enhancements, and their results, include:

Pop-up Alert and Query Tools: Our operations and software development teams worked to create pop-up tools to alert F&A staff to forms that need special handling, and pull-down menus to eliminate input errors.

Document Type Backlog Time to Clear Backlog

Domestic shipping forms

90,000 3 weeks

Duty and tax forms 65,000 2 weeks

International shipping forms

8,000 2 weeks



About DATAMARK

For more than 20 years, DATAMARK has provided mailroom management, data entry, document processing, contact center, business process improvement consulting and other outsourcing services for Fortune 500 companies across all industry sectors.

If you have questions or need assistance in developing your organization’s case for outsourcing and business process improvement, DATAMARK’s business process outsourcing specialists are available for a complimentary initial consultation.

Contact us at:

www.datamark.netToll-free: 800.477.1944Info: [email protected]

These systems have helped deliver a 99.9 percent accuracy rate.

Auditing Tools: Our quality-control system audits specific data, such as “Dangerous Goods” fields or broker information before they are entered into our client’s system. This has eliminated 99 percent of errors for these data entry fields.

Enhancements to Auto-Populate Fields: Our operations teams identified an issue with air waybill auto-populate fields in the client’s system that would trigger an error and send the bill to an exception queue for manual handling. By working with our client to resolve this issue, we expect to reduce the need for manual corrections by 20 percent.

A Strategic Partner

We understand the business-critical nature of document processing for the transportation and logistics industry.

Whether it involves a bill of lading for a trucking company or an air waybill for an international courier, any delay in the forms handling process is a delay in the invoice-to-cash cycle.

Our value proposition is built on a foundation of cost savings, innovation and continuous improvement for all F&A business processes, with the ultimate goal of accelerating your time-to-cash.

This is the reason DATAMARK has become a strategic outsourcing partner for our international courier client—a partnership still going strong after 24 years.

99%ELIMINATION OF ERRORS IN DATA

ENTRY FIELDS

20%REDUCTION OF

ERRORS SENT TO EXCEPTION QUEUES

99.9%ACCURACY RATE FOR PULL-DOWN MENU

DATA FIELDS