Receivables management has been restructured: In the 'Order to Cash' area, all processes are now managed from a single source – from master data maintenance to invoicing and tracking of open invoices to receipt of payment.

^{Thursday 2024-08-01}

Liquidity is an important financial goal. Companies must be "liquid" at all times so that planned investments and liabilities to suppliers can be paid. Efficient receivables management is therefore very important. Above all, it is important to keep an eye on the many current invoices: What is the status? When is the payment date? Has the money been received on the agreed date? If a payment is overdue, customers must be followed up immediately. After all, FORVIA HELLA plans to use the money for investments and to pay running costs on the agreed payment date. However, the focus is not only on receivables management for current invoices, but also on the maintenance and monitoring of customers' master data as well as error-free invoicing are immensely important in order to enable smooth receipt of payments.

Everything from a single source

In order to make this process faster and more efficient, FORVIA HELLA has founded the new "Order-to-Cash" (O2C) division under the direction of Dominique Schenkel. "We now pull all the strings along the financial value chain: from the order, the purchase order, to invoicing for tool and development cost refunds, invoice tracking, payment reminders and reminders, to the booking of incoming payment, the cash," says Schenkel, explaining the range of tasks of his team.

To ensure that all process steps are mapped correctly and efficiently, he and his team took a very close look in advance. Together with colleagues from the Business Process Management (BPM) department, they met in Romania at the beginning of the year for a kick-off workshop. With great success: In several sprints and parallel workshops, the processes were redefined or further improved.

The result is 21 individual processes, which are now binding and stored in the FORVIA HELLA process tool Signavio. With end-to-end responsibility for the entire team: from order receipt to receipt of payment, including all intermediate steps, the processes are processed from a single source. This saves interfaces and thus valuable time compared to the previous function-oriented organization. In it, responsibilities were divided into different departments such as Business Service Sales, Sales Operations, Accounts Receivables and Liquidity Management.

Today, the employees from the Order-to-Cash division are organized according to the respective sub-processes of data management, invoicing and cash collection and follow their processes from start to finish. For example, the person responsible from Cash Collection observes the customer accounts assigned to him, contacts the respective customer himself in the event of late payments and ensures that the invoice is paid quickly. They receive support from logistics, quality and, above all, sales, among other things. For the O2C team members, this approach means more responsibility on the one hand, and more room for manoeuvre and decision-making on the other, as well as the chance to drive things forward themselves.

Particularly helpful in the implementation of the new setup was that the FORVIA HELLA project team was able to draw on the experience of the Faurecia O2C team; Faurecia has been organized along the value chain for some time.

Part of Global Business Services

The Order-to-Cash team is part of Global Business Services. This organization has set itself the goal of making the administrative processes of the corporate functions and business units leaner, more efficient and more digital. Originally launched as a central support station for the FORVIA HELLA Business Groups, Global Business Services has developed into an incubator for digital service innovations in recent years, which can be used to make internal processes more efficient. Dominique Schenkel's team is represented in China, Europe and the NSA region. In China and the NSA region, the tasks are also handled by a FORVIA team, i.e. HELLA and FORVIA Faurecia employees. An order-to-cash excellence team also takes care of the continuous improvement of processes.

Bundling responsibility in one team is already paying off. "We can already see today that the realignment allows us to tackle and communicate the really critical cases much more efficiently and in a more targeted manner," states Dominique Schenkel.