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Is your order-to-cash cycle as

smart as it could be?


ways transaction intelligence can help reduce
5
days sales outstanding (DSO)

As companies strive to improve working capital operating ratios, a common objective is


emerging in the offices of the CEO, the CFO, and the CIO alike: reducing days sales outstanding
(DSO). But achieving this objective can be tricky. Because what used to be a straightforward task
— generating, printing, and mailing invoices — has morphed into a complex order-to-cash cycle
often supported by an unruly hybrid of legacy paper-based processes and new electronic systems
More than half of all and applications.
If your order-to-cash cycle were smart, it would be able to ensure:
channel inefficiencies
• that you know precisely which invoices have been successfully sent and received between
reside in the order- you and your customers;
• that your invoice dispute-resolution process is as efficient as possible;
to-cash cycle, where • that you can fully monitor interactions between your collectors and customers;
• and that your investments in ERP systems are helping to reduce DSO.
processing errors,
To gain intelligence like this, you need to be able to capture invoicing events in real time within
chargeback/rebate your enterprise, along your supply chain, and throughout your trading partner community. And
you need to provide information about those events in the right context, to the right people,
disputes, and a lack at the right time. If you can do this, you can reduce DSO with the end-to-end visibility your IT
of visibility into multi- staff, your business managers, and your trading partners need to better manage and predict cash
flows, improve quality of service, and reduce costs throughout your order-to-cash cycle.
enterprise processes
result in insufficient Here are 5 things you can do to improve working
working capital due capital by reducing days sales outstanding (DSO):
to high DSO. 1. Create a healthy learning environment by capturing events
in real time
As companies migrate from paper-based to electronic processes, many lack the tools necessary
to control and audit transaction trails in order to ensure successful processing and delivery of
invoices. Common issues surrounding electronic invoices include:

• Invoices are never sent to the customer because of internal integration issues
• Customers report that they did not receive the electronic invoice
• There is no audit trail showing the status of each step of the invoicing process

Addressing these issues begins with a framework that leverages your existing systems for invoice
and collection processing. From the time information leaves your back-end systems to the
moment an invoice travels the last mile to your trading community, Axway B2B gateways support
transaction intelligence by capturing processing events in real time from within and outside
your enterprise. These captured events are stored in a centralized event repository, along with
tracking of acknowledgements showing proof of invoice delivery, giving you access to actionable
intelligence about every transfer, transaction, and communication.
Axway Gateway Enterprise Network

Dispute and Collections


External Management

Connections Invoicing and Order


External sites Processing
Back-end
Servers
Credit and Risk
Management

Sales and Quote


Management
Application
Processing
Axway Visibility
Extneral users and Analytics

Remote Operations

External partners Internal users

Axway’s solution for your order-to-cash challenges: Actionable intelligence about enterprise system data,
correlated with business process logic, to improve working capital by reducing days sales outstanding (DSO).

You can optimize 2. Become a proactive genius about errors, exceptions, and near-
order-to-cash due invoices
processes and The best way to ensure timely payment is to stay on top of invoice transaction events and due dates.
Because, once an invoice is past due, your collectors have to resort to a combination of uncoordinated
reduce problem technologies and old-fashioned methods — like phone calls, emails, faxes, and overnight mail — to
resolution time investigate reasons for the delay in payment and send invoice copies. All of these internal and external
interactions add time and cost to your collection process, create fragmented audit trails that reduce
and costs by as control and visibility, and further increase DSO.
much as 80% with Axway leapfrogs these hitches in your order-to-cash processes by providing real-time views, notifications,
Axway’s event alerts, and monitoring for business processes within and beyond your enterprise. Timely awareness of
events or non-events at the file level and/or business level allows you to more effectively manage your
monitoring, non- order-to-cash cycle.
event detection,
In addition to setting up proactive alerts and automatic actions for near-due invoices, you can also detect
and proactive and remedy common errors and exceptions, including when:
notification of • Invoices generated by billing systems are not sent to EDI translators
potential process • Invoice content errors are encountered during EDI translation
• Invoices are translated but not sent to customers
disruptions. • Invoices are sent via the B2B gateway but the payer’s system does not send acknowledgements
• eInvoices are received by payers but are rejected during the three-way matching process
3. Master dispute management and bill-to-cash processes
To properly follow the trail of an invoice and find the source of a problem, collectors must interact with
their internal IT departments that support the ERP billing system, EDI translation, application integration,
and B2B communications process. Conversely, the accounts payable processor on the payer side must
contact the EDI coordinator to find out if the invoice was received by their B2B gateway. Did the invoice
fail during EDI translation? Was the invoice sent to the ERP system?

Often, it is easier for the payer to tell the collector, “we never received the invoice,” without actually doing
any investigation. This puts the burden back on the collector, who then must engage their IT Help Desk to
troubleshoot the root cause of the invoice error, when in fact there may not have been any error in the
process at all. The amount of time spent on these issues can be considerable — but it can be remedied.

Axway EndPoints & Community Solutions enable you to establish secure last-mile connections that
streamline how you manage and interact with your trading community. Automated endpoint provisioning
and pre-configured functionality lets you give end users quick and easy access to your secure file-transfer
infrastructure — from ad hoc interactive transfer using a Web browser to fully automated EDI and batch-
transfer jobs on mainframe platforms — no matter what systems they use or how technically adept they
are. Armed with a wealth of real-time information, community members can work together to reconcile
and resolve disputes before they negatively impact business relationships or DSO.

4. Earn straight A’s with performance metrics


Does this scenario sound familiar? Fill rates are at an all-time high. On-time delivery is steadily improving.
Order-to-delivery cycles were reduced by three days last year. And yet your DSO increased by five days
compared to the same period last year. This problem is typically due to invoice processing inefficiencies
attributed to one or more of the following events:
Additional Working Capital (000)
• There is no purchase order
• There is no record of receipt of the goods Reduction in DSO 3 Days 5 Days 7 Days
• There are problems with quality of the goods
Annual Revenues:
• There is inaccurate invoice information
250 Million $2,054 $3,424 $4,754
• There are order discrepancies
500 Million 4,109 6,849 9,589
Axway can help you eliminate these problems and get
1 Billion 8,219 13,698 19,178
DSO moving in the right direction by empowering
2.5 Billion 20,547 34,246 47,945
different groups within your community to see what
is relevant to them at all times. Intuitive technical and 5 Billion $41,095 $68,493 $95,890
business dashboards allow business and IT users to view
and react to monitored data exchanges using event-
The potential for improving working capital
based processing and alerts across all major networks,
by reducing DSO by 3, 5 or 7 days
mainframes, servers, desktops, and software applications.
You can allow customers to track their own orders,
suppliers to monitor fulfillment, IT to monitor exceptions, and line-of-business managers to extract
business content and run analytics to gain critical insight into your key performance indicators (KPIs) and
business processes.

With real-time monitoring and control over your order-to-cash cycle, you’ll know exactly what’s happening
and when, so you can detect and correct malfunctions in real time. And, by tracking and analyzing
interactions and policy violations over time, both IT and business managers can adaptively streamline
automated processes and direct human resources where they’re needed most.
5. Establish business-to-business (B2B) data visibility, including
positive-impact financials, business efficiencies, and customer service
data
From the time an order is initiated until payment is reconciled, Axway provides visibility into transactional
data as it flows throughout your trading network. Because Axway tracks processing chains at both
technical and business levels, it puts events and processes in a context that is easy for business managers
and IT staff to understand. And, because you can monitor both Axway and third-party applications and
systems, you have clear visibility into all data flows throughout your extended supply chain.

Through intuitive dashboards for monitoring events and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in real time,
you have a global — yet sharply focused — view of all of your IT and business processes, including
Managed File Transfer and B2B transactions.You can see what is happening with each customer and partner,
which invoices aren’t being paid, and where data isn’t matching physical reality. And, you can aggregate
intelligence up from the transaction level to the functional level to get a complete picture of the enterprise,
helping you to reduce DSO by avoiding invoicing errors and detecting and correcting issues before they
become big, expensive problems.

Axway solutions for smart order-to-cash cycles can help you bring
money in the door faster.
•T
 o address the issues associated with managing the billing process,
including both electronic- and paper-based invoicing, Axway monitors
the entire invoice cycle — from invoice origination to receipt at the
payer system.
• S imilar to online package tracking capabilities provided by the major
logistics carriers, Axway delivers insight into and correlation of all
invoice processing events to help accelerate your cash collections.
•T
 he ability to track and store all interactions (such as emails) that occur
between the collector and payer provides a detailed audit trail for the
dispute resolution process.
To learn more, call your regional office listed below, email us at
axwaysolutions@axway.com, or visit us at www.axway.com.

CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS About Axway +1 480.627.1800


6811 E. Mayo Blvd.,
Axway is the Business Interaction Networks company—the only provider in the market today to manage, run, secure, and monitor all
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of your business interactions, including email, files, messaging, services, events, and processes. Serving over 11,000 organizations in
P: 480.627.1800 more than 100 countries, Axway facilitates the multi-enterprise transactions, processes and integration that accelerate business by
F: 480.627.1801 eliminating the barriers between vendors, customers, departments, partners and suppliers. Axway's comprehensive offerings include
business-to-business integration, managed file transfer, secure email, business activity monitoring, enterprise application integration,
EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS service-oriented architecture, business process management, track & trace and identity validation solutions. Axway provides
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