Evolution of the Deductions Process

Jill Barnes:

Well, thanks for being here and for a session before lunch. Sometimes, I know those can be light but we love questions and we think that sometimes the best part of doing these sessions. Please don’t wait until the end. You know, raise your hand if you have a question about something we said or about. Why we did something is because this is talking about our journey and we’re excited to share it because it’s something we’ve just been through. So, as they said- I’m Jill Barnes. I’ve been with Ardent Mills for about five years which is the entire length of the company. So it’s a new company and I was originally hired for doing treasury operations. As their joint venture formed, which was a really exciting time and for the past two years- I have also been doing Accounts Receivable. My general past is in that Treasury ops kind of area. AR a little bit newer for me although it all kind of mixes together.

Marjorie Beede:

Alright. And again, I’m Marjorie Beede. I started as a collector on the A.R. team and then I moved full time basically to the HighRadius implementation and then after that, I moved on to cash up supervisor but still doing the continued improvement and reporting for the AR team and I’m the admin for HighRadius.

Jill Barnes:

We gave her multiple jobs.

Marjorie Beede:

Yes, I wear many hats. Alright, so here’s our agenda for today. So we’ll go a little bit over what Arden Mills is and what we do then we’ll talk about our journey through what we call our deductions black hole. We’ll talk about us when we implemented HighRadius and then our results.

Jill Barnes:

So about Ardent Mills. Once we go on to the next life. So, here are some interesting facts about Ardent Mills. So to give you a little bit of background about our company and it tells you where we were and why we went on this journey and how things happened. So as I kind of mentioned we’re a new company formed in May of 2014 and we were formed as a joint venture between ConAgra, Cargill, and CHS. So, some names you know about. So, we’re a flour milling company. We have a long legacy in the flour milling industry but we’re very much a stand-up mindset with an arm’s length distance between us and our parent company.

So we were very much of the mind that we wanted to do things our way. I don’t necessarily want to do things the way ConAgra did them or the way Cargill did them and me not being from the legacy companies made that kind of easy because I can do this the way I want to do them. And so that’s kind of a nice outside perspective sometimes. During the joint venture formation, it was kind of interesting. I came in a few months before formation and the legal team had to certify me as clean. I could talk to either side because it was going through the Department of Justice’s approval and a lot of things like that. Oh, Clifford. That’s nice. Thank you so much. So it was a really exciting time and me not coming from an AG business. I am actually from the Dallas area and I’ve been doing treasury operations there for 11 years at a company Suncor Realty in Weitzman. So a lot of you probably know those from commercial real estate in the Texas market. So moving over to AG is very very different, very different treasury operations design. Something I had no idea was that there are over twelve hundred kinds of flours that Ardent Mill sells. Who even knew there was more than brown flour and white fluffy flour? I had no clue. It was very interesting. One of the things we’re very proud of is that we feed. We estimate that more than 100 million people across North America consume our ingredients every day.

So some of our core values include safety. One of those is food safety. Trust serving simplicity and safety or core values you’ll kind of hear them sprinkled throughout. And those had a lot to do with how we looked at our processes. So a little bit more about why we ended up in the place where we were and when you talk about the deductions black hole that was very real for us and it was very much of a black hole. I love the imagery on these screens. There are some of the most fun slides I’ve probably ever spoken to. But this was a very real thing for us. So the big data dump is a real thing coming off of our parents’ systems off their SAP systems. We decided not to stay with this SAP. So we’re currently on Microsoft Dynamics GP, a little bit more in that AG space. It’s not a big fancy Oracle SAP kind of product. We’re a single line of business so we thought that was better suited to what we wanted to do. We got off the parents’ systems very quickly. When I say I mean 18 months quickly, like it was from an ERP migration standpoint for a new stand up, a company is very very quick. So we took that out of the box approach. We wanted to get on the new ERP, get off the parent systems, see what it could do, kind of kick the wheels, see what it did with our A.R. We ended up with a very large data dump in our A.R. services for those systems. And I think some of that was because we were on a shared service with our parent companies.

You know ConAgra, Cargill multi-lines of business going on there. And to go away now from that shared service to standing this department upon our own, it’s very different. So it resulted in a large data dump. Also, no defined team and no standardized processes. We were standing this up all on our own. We didn’t take those processes from the Corporate with us. We did everything on our own. So a lot to be getting through. Now, when we went on our new ERP, we discovered- yeah it’s a 100 percent manual. There was no extra automation or efficiencies that our ERP offered without anything laying on top of it. So that was a very difficult place to be. Hundred percent manual, we didn’t have a way to identify incoming deductions and Marjorie will talk a little bit more about why that was or how that worked but we were going through customer accounts and saying where’s the short pays, where are the standalone deductions. They weren’t being tagged or automatically identified as they came into our system at all. So it was very hard to locate them, very hard from a reporting perspective to say how many deductions this customer has and what percent of their total margin or revenue is that. We just didn’t have a way to even calculate that. So it was a very very difficult time. We have about 1600 deductions a month. And right now, in our Canadian market in our U.S. market, we have about 1100 active customers.

Marjorie Beede:

All right. So now that Jill’s gone over a little bit about how deductions look at Ardent Mills and our landscape we’ll talk about our journey through our black hole. So we kind of approach deductions in three different strategies. So strategy 1, which was 100 percent manual like Joe talked about that’s where we started and the collectors were doing all of the deductions work and all of the research and backup pulling. So, to deal with the volume issues we had in strategy 1, we moved to strategy 2, where we doubled up the team of contractors just to help with that manual work. And that backlog from combining the two-parent ERPs into our own and then strategy 3. So that’s when we implemented the HighRadius deductions module and finally saw some automation and some relief from that manual work. Alright, so first we’ll talk about strategy 1.

So, here’s what the workload looks like in strategy one. So all we had were collectors on the team and they handled the collections and the deductions workload and again the process was 100 percent manual. We were working out of our ERP which didn’t have any dedicated deductions tools. So, the collectors had to identify the short pays, find the backup, contact customers, check the portal, check emails for backup, a route to the customer service rep or sales rep if it needed approval, also maintain those account statements and do their collections. And Jill touched on this but we had no deductions queue.

So basically at any given time, we had no visibility into the number of deductions we had if the collector hadn’t found it yet and coded it. So that’s a big reason why we call it the black hole because we just did not know the deductions volume. So a collector would be doing their collections well up a customer statement. Then, okay well, the open amount is not equal to the original amount. There is a short pay. And that was how they identified it. That was the tool, their brains. So then they would code it at that time or research it, route it in an email. So now we’re losing. We have no document repository. We’re losing track of those deductions. We’re just emailing customer service or emailing the customer. So as you can imagine that took a long time. And if you’re expecting your collectors to run a statement maybe once a week then until they get to that statement we don’t even know the deductions out there and we’ve lost all that time and are trying to resolve it.

Jill Barnes:

So I love when Marjorie says the route to the right stakeholder that was email in the attachments where just the attachments were overwhelming. You know you have gone and gotten all these attachments from different places. You don’t have a single place to keep them. So you’re just attaching them to an email, maybe keeping them in a folder structure. If you need to go get them again. And then my favorite thing you know, did you reply or did you forward that email. So you either kept your attachments or you lost them. You know we’re forwarding them cross-functional around the company and just the cross-functional interaction with our customer service team and our sales team. Very difficult. You know this is not a good communication time for us.

Marjorie Beede:

Right and as you can imagine it took a ton of time for them to just do their collections work because every time they came across a short span of a statement, they stopped their collections, moved over to deductions. So for them just thinking, alright, I’ll spend the first half of my day firing out statements. It just did not go smoothly for them at all. So it was a really bad employee experience.

Jill Barnes:

Yeah. The teams were not very happy at that point. So here are some of our key concerns. Lots of red Xs here. Our teams had a real inability to focus on actual collections. They’re just mired down in all the other things that we’re trying to do, keeping track of these super long email chains of back and forth sales. Do you approve of this? Was this a valid deduction? Okay now, can you send it back to me? And they don’t remember when they sent it over so it was very difficult and at this time because of our ERP data dump we had the new company we have new teams.

Our AR team is one of our teams that did not come from the legacy company much like me. So I don’t think I have anybody in AR right now who came from the legacy company. So just that transition of hiring a new workforce and getting those people acquainted with your customers as full-time employees, very difficult. The customer experience was not great. So think about just having your customer try to send you a payment in your new name. Very difficult, and we’re reaching out to them multiple times to get the same information because we don’t know that we already have it and at this time our metrics are also suffering. So we had a very low percent current. We had a very high 90 plus bucket. It’s very difficult. This is one of the times, this is the time where I just started in AR at Ardent Mills. And one of the first things my treasurer told me was – yeah we’re on board review. So I don’t want to be on the topic on the agenda at the board meeting. That’s something I don’t want to do. We had no visibility. We didn’t have any queues. We didn’t have workflows. We didn’t even really have at this point a good idea of how it goes here, it goes here and then it goes here and then it comes back to AR. And what is that the validation process that the customer service agent is taking. If we need to send it for sales do we know why is that a certain threshold? We had all a lot of things we were still working through. And of course, a lack of backup documentation. So here’s something I’m interested in hearing from the crowd. So Ardent Mills started with having our collectors and our deductions on the same team, the same person. You’ll see where we varied away from that and now we’re back to it. So how many of you also have your collections and your deductions on the same team?

Marjorie Beede:

Interesting that there’s quite a bit.

Jill Barnes:

Okay, so I would assume that the other half of you have them split into different departments or different people. So the same department, different people. Okay so I’m getting like a 50-50 split there which is so interesting and I love to understand. So if I come and ask you guys later why you split it. Because that’s the interesting thing. Why do you put it together or why do you split it up? So just an interesting question. Yeah. So you’re kind of seeing our journey coming up next. And that’s the next step right here perfectly. We had to go outsourcing, so we couldn’t be with the team that we had, with full-time individuals. We knew that these were the full-time people that we thought we were going to need as our basis moving forward. But we just couldn’t manage. So we had to get some more people in some more seats. We knew we needed the automation. We didn’t have it yet. We were still looking at tools. But right now, we needed people in seats, bodies, and seats to get this work done. So we doubled up the team. But we knew that it needed to be temporary. And Marjorie will go through how we kind of split the roles and then now how we have them back together.

Marjorie Beede:

Okay, so we’ll talk about Strategy 2 now which was when we doubled up on contractors. So when we brought on the contractors we had to switch up the team alignment a bit. So we tag the contractors as dispute coordinators and then we assign them to the collections team. So the collectors still own the account. They still chose the priority to work. What account was important, what deduction backlog we should be working on and then they remain that point of contact for the customer. And then also for internal escalations like customer service, cross-functional collaboration with sales and things like that. So, this freed up a ton of time for the collectors to get back to the collections work and start bringing down those past dues.

Jill Barnes:

One of the biggest reasons why we split things the way we did was that I wanted those full-time employees to retain that knowledge and relationship with the customer. I didn’t want to give accounts to a contractor. Who they could have a full-time position the next week and they’re out the door. So that was an important factor in our decisions here.

Marjorie Beede:

So we’ll do a quick recap of Strategy 1. So as you could see the collectors handling every part of the collections and deductions role and in one hundred percent manual process. So here’s Strategy 2. So you see still a hundred percent manual work because we haven’t changed systems at this point we’re still working in the ERP. But you see how the contractors are doing a lot of that manual work so they’re the ones pulling the statements finding the short pays before the collectors would get to them and then gathering the backup information whether it’s going into customer portals or looking for that email backup it might be with the remit. They might have just sent it to the inbox then. Now the collectors they’re prioritizing the accounts, they’re doing all their collections activities and they’re the point person.

Jill Barnes:

So here’s where we are now. You know we have some green checkmarks up here now. We have a better focus on collections and we have somebody doing all this manual backup documentation for us but it’s coming at a really big cost. You know we, so our collection team is our size and we have four teams. One for Canada. Three for the US. And there are two people on each team. So that’s eight collectors and we double that if you added on four extra for our contractor assistance.

So just managing that team as a manager was extremely daunting. It’s just a whole different set of the workforce between your FTEs and your contractors. And again we were really worried about that customer knowledge that we were trying so hard to gain. We were worried about that walking out the door, which can happen. You know the contractors had a really difficult learning curve. We had a new ERP. It was new to us. Also new to them. And so you have a new person, training a new person. Very difficult. The customer experience is now even further degrading because we have full-time employees calling them for collections. Sometimes we also have contractors calling them for backup research questions, “Can you send me this documentation”. So now we have even more people calling them in so the relationship building is not there.

Marjorie Beede:

That’s very true and a lot of the times what I would see because I was a collector during Strategy 1 and 2. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to be a collector during Strategy 3 but that’s fine. So a lot of times the contractors would be contacting them for deduction backup and then the conversation blows and they write back saying, “Oh and I’m sending this payment and can you send me this statement”, and then they have to pass it back off to the collector. So that just creates the experience all around.

Jill Barnes:

A difficult time. So our next steps were we’ve just gotta have some automation. Again you know leaving that shared service where you had people, you had automation and then going on your own and going on the new ERP, it was just really difficult. So we knew that for our size of a business and for what we wanted to do, we needed automation. And that’s one of the things that our leadership was very specific and intentional about. We didn’t just say, now we’re talking about deductions. Here I’m going a little broader. So we didn’t just say, “I want automation in cash app or I want automation over here in deduction”, we’re going to try and make the rest work. We’re like no we need automation and we need it in all of our AR pieces so Ardent Mills actually has the deductions, cash app, and collections modules and we went live with them all on the very same day. So we went to a big bang approach. We decided this is what we wanted. This was important to us. For our culture and our core value of simplicity. This is what we wanted to have. We wanted to be a highly automated company. So here we are the contractors, they’re not solving the issues. We knew that they’re a Band-Aid so it’s time to move on. It’s time to get the automation okay.

Marjorie Beede:

So now we’ll talk about strategy 3 which is when we implemented the deductions management solution and HighRadius. All right. So again let’s recap the previous strategy. So here is where the contractors are doing the manual work and the collectors are doing their collection work and hundred percent manual process. All right so here’s what it looked like after automation. So we started ramping down on our contractor help because a lot of that manual work that you see here was now automated.

So the biggest task which was identifying the short pays, that’s gone. So the tools doing that for us. As soon as deductions are created and it goes into the deductions module it’s either coded with a reason code. If the tool was able to pick that reason code up from the remit or it’s coded as unknown. So the great thing there is that at least we know the number of deductions at any given time, where, before unknown meant we haven’t seen it yet. So that’s huge. So we’ve filled in the black hole now.

Jill Barnes:

Any questions?

Marjorie Beede:

Yep. So it can do that, sometimes it does it automatically if it can read, if we’ve mapped a certain code like let’s say, a customer if they’re taking damage, they are coded as R1 which we have. A lot of large customers use this type of coding, so if we created a mapping for that, it can pick that reason code up and tag it at that time or my team if they see something on a remit like damages are bracing, they can add the reason code manually and then as soon as it goes into the deductions module, we’ve set up the additional mapping. So it goes to the right person. So if it’s pricing it goes to the customer service rep, if it’s trade promo it goes to the finance manager. So not only is it getting a reason code at the time of cash it’s also just going right into the right person’s queue. So it’s on its deductions journey right away instead of sitting and waiting. So it’s cool.

Jill Barnes:

And one of the points there is the whole black hole going on is that we don’t want them to be unidentified and we don’t want something to be to not be capturing those for us. And we’re just finding them on the account. So even though a lot of them may route to the right team you know it’s not going to route everything for us. So a lot of them at least it’s tagging them as unknown and it’s putting it in the right collector’s queue because it’s going to know the customer. Right. It just might not know the reason code or might not be able to go into all these other places and find the backup that we need. So it can’t identify it but it’s identifying it for the customer, it’s putting it in the queue of the right person and saying new unknown you need to work at.

Marjorie Beede:

Yeah and the great thing about that and we can touch on that we’ll touch on that a little bit later is how we’re able to set goals for the team and kind of set the timing around how quickly they would want them to move something out of their unknown queue. Before we couldn’t set any goals because we didn’t ourselves not even know how many deductions were out there or how long they’ve been there.

Jill Barnes:

Yeah.

Marjorie Beede:

So the manual work you see a lot of it was now automated with the tool and then their collections work was enhanced so like Jill said we also implemented the collections module so their collections work was also sped up by that other tool that we had.

Jill Barnes:

So here we’re meeting a lot of our customers and we’re meeting all of our key concerns. I mean this was a great time for us like I said we went that big bang approach and we started seeing the efficiencies immediately and it gave our teams the time that we needed as a company to go back in and work through that backlog. Like I said the 90 plus at this time was astronomical. We just couldn’t even find all those deductions that were aging and get them resolved to get the backup with them, get them approved or say they’re invalid and collect. So immediately after our implementation, we saw all of those things start to come together. The team was now working back on collections and it was a great thing. So it mentioned standardized processes. One thing I wanted to mention is that before we went and started our blueprinting and our implementation and in mapping things out, we as a new company we wanted to make sure our processes were right. Customer service do you know which deductions you’re handling and you’re responsible for. I’m going to be sending these to you.

So we kind of had a SWAT-style meeting. We said everybody we need to come to the conference room for a day. We’re going to map this out. These deductions I’m assigned to you. Sales you’re going to get these if they’re over two thousand dollars trade you’re going over here to accounting. So we said, does everybody know what they’re accountable for? And I didn’t. The point of that was we didn’t want to put a non-process or an unclear process or a bad process on top of our automation that was supposed to give us all these wonderful things we wanted to have success right at our implementation. So that was a big factor for us being successful at our goal. It was one of the best things we did.

So here’s our results across the board. A 50 percent headcount reduction. That was very very real for us. Like I said that 50 percent was in contractor assistance. Although you know I like to think that if I’m ever thinking about a headcount reduction that doesn’t always mean to me it doesn’t mean layoffs. It means I’m re-appropriating my team for more value-added tasks in my group in somebody else’s group somewhere else in the company. One thing I don’t ever want to do is lose great people because I’ve now input automation. I don’t think it has to be that way or am I losing them through natural attrition, you know or I think there’s a lot of other options there for us it was Rand ramping down on our contractor assistance. We set out month over month, how many contractors can I, do I need this month and did a 12-month ramp down. So 12 months after our go live, to the day we were contractor free and we have been ever since and it’s been a great thing for us. We now have a centralized backup. This was a huge deal for our audit. You know we had to say our internal audit coming in from ConAgra and Cargill they expected certain things and they wanted automatic deduction itemizing routing workflows. Those were some things we had to have and we know when they come in we can pull all that backup right from our web interface. And it’s a great experience. It’s so easy getting it over to our auditors, internal and external audits. I think Marjorie got a great comment from our last AR audit and they said you were the guys who are the most organized company.

Marjorie Beede:

Yeah. And it wasn’t.

Jill Barnes:

Now we are.

Marjorie Beede:

When the audit came to town asking for you to know they used to come and ask for backup on how a deduction got approved or a credit memo got approved that just meant emailing out to customer service reps and collectors trying to get them to send us that backup. Hoping that they could just find it in their sent emails from up to a year ago. But now anyone can go on a deduction in HighRadius. Look at the notes history, look at the attachments, link to the backup that might be in cash apps and anyone can look at that until that deduction story without having to find the actual people who worked it.

Jill Barnes:

And I was talking about our 90 plus. So I don’t know what percentage 90 plus was at the time it was very very high. Now we’re meeting our expectations. We’re not on the board agenda and our 90 plus is point three percent of our total A.R. which I think when I look at Hackett and those other bench markings, is beating that by an excessive amount. So we’re really happy about that. Our team goals are completely different. The team is having a very different experience as well. We get a lot of our ideas from the team about enhancements that we want to ask HighRadius to make for us. And to dates, we’ve had every enhancement rolled out successfully and it’s usually rolled out to all HighRadius users so we love to see that too. But it’s a great experience for the team. The team is now focused on analytics. You know real things that we can do for the company to impact sales. You know if we’re looking at deductions, we can run things in our reporting either inside HighRadius analytics or our reporting that we also get as we get a raw data feed from high ratings every night to load into our reporting tool.

Jill Barnes:

We do both and now we’re looking at not only okay your queue is way too high you have too many deductions I need you to work those but we’re now saying how many deductions did this customer have. And now I can compare that to their margin on sale and say okay your percent of deductions as you as part of your marginal sales are way too high. And I can put that in perspective for the sales team and it’s giving our AR team a much broader impact and leverage that we can do for the company besides dialing for dollars. So it’s a great experience. So the next steps we have automation with A.I.

Marjorie Beede:

Okay so here’s what the future looks like in deductions and HighRadius in some of these, they are all cool but I’m excited about the top one – auto resolution of low-value deductions. So Ardent Mills has a lot of damage disputes because we’re selling bags of flour in bulk. But in this example bags. So a bag falls off a truck and it breaks, that’s a damage dispute and it’s going to be a really small deduction. So we can decide if it’s damaged and it’s under a certain amount just to auto clear it to a damaging deal. So the CSR customer service rep doesn’t have to take the time to approve this because it’s going to get approved anyway. So this is good and it’ll save a lot of time for the collectors. And then deduction validity predictor. So the tool can look at the characteristics and history of a customer’s deduction. What was determined to be valid, what was determined to be collectible and make a prediction? So then the customer or the collector can then prioritize those items that are most likely collectible and get those validated and then sent back over to the customer to pay. So overall this just reduces a ton of time it takes to resolve deductions which is our ultimate goal.

Jill Barnes:

So here’s a little bit more about our implementation strategy. Like I talked about we did three modules all the same time. One of the best things that we did during our implementation because we had the new ERP, we had new people, we had contractors and you know morale at that time was not the highest. And so we were telling people that we’re getting this new automation it’s going to be great. We were trying to drive a lot of motivation. And one of the best change management pieces we did was parallel testing. Where we let some of those team leads and some of those folks on the team get into the system early and it was a great way for us to check how our bank integrations were running.

You know we already had bank files in place but how were those running through to HighRadius and then how were they coming back to our company. Did they have all the information in there? Was it successful going into all of our email remittances? What about our Website portals for all of our customers? Was it bringing those things in? We could check the cash app, AR, collections, deductions. It was nice and it meant a lot to the teams if they could see it working and they were much more invested.

Marjorie Beede:

Yep, our teams kind of just based on their experience they had a drudge they wanted to have an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude which I do not blame them for. So when we were able to bring them in for some testing we saw they were getting excited about the tool right away. Just the routing, the attachments. I mean it just has a, it just makes working deductions which is not a fun thing to do easily.

Jill Barnes:

And of course one of the biggest was our ally. So we were looking at obviously a headcount reduction. We also had a bank fee reduction because we weren’t asking our lockbox to keep all those extra special fields for us and we weren’t paying them to do it. We were having it done through HighRadius. So we had a good ally and it was showing after our implementation and our percent current going up, and our deduction activity going down or 90 plus going down.

So we’ve just actually been asked to do a look back on our project a year and a half later now to say how it is working now. Because at the time our whole company was doing this. Every system in Ardent Mills needed automation just like we did. So that’s another reason we went with the big bang approach. Our I.T department wanted to focus on us. And then they wanted to move on to everybody else who needed the same kind of help. It was nice. The enhancements we’ve had are nice. We like it when the modules talk to each other. And that was one of the things that we wanted. We wanted a cohesive holistic approach. That’s how we think about our customers. So that’s how we wanted to think about our automation tool. Marjorie is our enhancement person. She logs all of our enhancements and so we love to get those from the team.

Jill Barnes:

We had a lot of audit commitments that were now satisfied but that’s kind of our journey. Any questions? Well, I can answer that. And it makes me so frustrated. It’s still deductions. Oh, where has our team spent the most time now after implementation and its deductions due to customer behavior? I love our customers. And I just want them to send the remittance backup and I don’t know why they won’t.

Marjorie Beede:

Yeah, one by one.

Jill Barnes:

Yeah, that’s it. When it comes to customer behavior that one still gets me. It’s a hard one.

Audience:

Hello. What is your average turnaround time? So from a deduction coming into closure what is your average turnaround?

Jill Barnes:

Great question. So we have very defined goals. Now it doesn’t mean we’re meeting all of them. One of our places that we’re meeting that goal is in our customer service area. Man, they are doing a great job and they do not like to work out deductions and they do not want to look at them. They want to place orders you know. They want to talk to customers. They want to talk to our mills. They want to get orders on the road trucks rolling and that’s their job.

So yes you also have to help me with deductions but we have a very strict kind of seven-day turnaround. If I get it to you I’d like it back in a week. Something that is we’re working on to be more automated after our implementation is getting fewer unknowns so that we don’t have to go work the unknown queue.

Marjorie Beede:

We have time for one more.

Audience:

Thank you. I’ve got five questions.

Marjorie Beede:

Oh, you’re not going to make her happy.

Audience:

Just a couple of things I want to ask because you touched on a lot. What you went through was great. We’re looking at getting the whole deductions module. But a couple of things, you said your collectors are now doing the process and someone asked early how much time does the collector spend on deductions versus collections. Where is your biggest trade-off? Collecting the dollars providing the cash flow for the company or matching the deduction? One question. The next question is at the start what was the percentage of your deductions relative to your aging and what is it today?

Jill Barnes:

Why don’t you take Marjorie the question about how much time do you think collectors spend on deductions today?

Marjorie Beede:

So I think that varies a lot by portfolio so I don’t know if I’m gonna have a great answer for you. We have some portfolios that are a trade promo heavy and those items take a long time. Yeah, we have like retail customers that are deduction heavy so I don’t know if I can give an overall answer about the time split.

Jill Barnes:

Although I don’t think for any of our teams that we have a broken up national, food service, retail and then kind of regional. They all have their special issues. And I think none of it is 50-50. I think deductions are always less than 50 percent of their work these days if not much less. But that’s something we’re still working on. You had another question though and it was the?

Audience:

Although I don’t think for any of our teams that we have a broken up national foodservice, retail and then kind of regional. They all have their special issues. And I think none of it is 50-50. I think deductions are always less than 50 percent of their work these days if not much less. But that’s something we’re still working on. You had another question though and it was the? At the start of the project, you said that you had liked knowing your aging was pretty bad. Your deductions. What was it relative to your aging as a percentage and what’s it today?

Jill Barnes:

So, at that time one of the problems was that we didn’t have any metrics. We didn’t have any visibility. We barely knew what our percent current was. And that was even kind of hard to get. I believe our metric wise, our percent was in the low 70s. When we started on our new ERP we’re now like Canada last period it was ninety-five percent current, it was fantastic. And when I look at what they have in there now for deductions we have a few unpaid invoices that were always the issues. If we have an ERP that’s going live or an EDI that’s kind of trying to get up and running but mostly it’s still deduction heavy when we’re looking at past dues. That’s our number one reason. If not some of the sole reasons for our past dues.