Jacob Whetstone [0:09]
Right, thank you. Thank you for coming all the way down here to see this presentation. I hope it was up to the hype and your walk down here. So yeah, just real quick. So I don’t know if people know who Ted DiBiase is, he’s a million-dollar man, as a kid growing up, you know, I watched wrestling with my dad, and we were in an airport. And I was using the urinal, and a lot comes from Ted DiBiase, he’s in the next year. Next to me, which you know, some of that you look up to the watch to see on TV, it’s a little bit awkward meeting them at the urinal. So do you know do a double-take to this guy was a little kid, I’m sure he was thinking, you know, What’s this guy doing to me next to the euro. And then you know, asking to shake his hand or something else just seemed out of place. So I didn’t get to do any of that. But it is my claim to fame. And then yeah, in sixth grade, our school was part of working weather unit in school, and we are with the local weather channel. And I want some contests. So I came on right before the break and said something like, you know, stay tuned for the weather coming up after the break. And then they cut the commercial break. And my friend also won and he was like, now time for the weather some so that was I tell my kids about this. And they wanted to see a video of this. And you know, we have it on a VCR tape somewhere and trying to explain to my kids what a VCR was, and that you couldn’t YouTube this clip. They didn’t they didn’t like that. So they’ve actually never seen it. But those were my two fun facts. So. So yeah, there’s not a lot of us here. So if we want to make this more interactive or have more discussion, you know, feel free to ask questions or whatever else, I’ll just go through the slides, see what prompts anything. I don’t know if we’ll take the whole time or not. But so just talking about how at Dinoland, we became a shared service center. And I’ll not say too much don’t get ahead of myself. But we really focused on four main reasons why we wanted to do a shared service center. So for us, we’re located just outside of Denver, Colorado, and at that office, we do all the credit collections counts, you know, anything with accounts receivable there for all North America and Canada’s the businesses that we cover. But we really wanted to make sure that we drove efficiency by bringing it in-house instead of and also creating synergy. So instead of having the different business units throughout these different businesses, both in North America or the United States and Canada, being able to bring it into one, get synergies from similar customers similar processes just create a lot of different synergies, being able to have one standardization so that we could continue to bring companies in, but also share best practices with the rest of the world who is doing this, bringing companies into a shared service environment, and then being able to just improve processes overall, and be able to find better solutions of how to go about the customer working with the customers. So I’m not going to ask for any answers for this. But a lot of I think different companies have different reasons for going to a shared service center. I know this seems to be a lot of trends going on. So you know just what kind of drives your need to go to a shared service center. So we’ll talk about denoting a little bit more, go over some of the levers that we use when we were trying to accelerate this and bring the businesses into a shared service center and then just quickly conclude. So I said to know some of the brands that people may know a little bit more Dinoland is more of a French word. But Danone yogurt is the biggest brand. So any of the Danone yogurt products, or without activity is one of our products. octavos is a Greek product that we sell. We also just buy white wave foods, which are on there. And that’s the transition that we’re going through right now, which is why we’re located in Denver. But WhiteWave one of their biggest products is silk milk if people are familiar with that, or New Horizons, so we are a food manufacturer. And so that’s our shared service environment is those different businesses so to Danone was one business unit, why was another business unit didn’t own waters at Aeon is our brand that most people know about. So that was another business unit, and then didn’t own Canada, a happy family makes baby food. They’re currently not in our shared service environment. So that’s one of our plans is to bring them on in the coming few months or years. They’re not timetable set. And then dyno nutrition is a medical food company. So that makes up our genome portfolio. But yeah, we have 50 about 53 people in our department, and that’s including any managers, but like, you know, like was said we do cash application, credit collections, deduction management, all that within those 54 people, we handle over $500,000 deductions, the majority of that are trade-related. And then some are non-trade-related. So there’s a lot of transactions that go through that. But a lot of it was those efficiencies and everything else, bringing them in a house being able to handle that high volume with the people that we had there.
Jacob Whetstone [4:34]
So some of the things that we really wanted to focus on, I think three priorities that we’re going to talk about are just people processes and technology. So with the people, it was very interesting going through this whole process of bringing these businesses in so what I have here is just the fear of losing jobs, and that wasn’t necessarily our shared service center, but it was helping the people that we were taking their jobs from being able to help them overcome their fear that they have to lose their job. In a way that they’re still being able to trust us, and will share with us the knowledge that we have so that when we bring our business in, we’re successful. And then of course, as we have that shared service environment, we need to increase our headcount to cover that. So just being able to make sure that we hire the right people, bringing them in, making sure that they’re trained, and ready to handle the new processes and everything that’s going on, and then being able to deal with any local nuances that we have. So again, our biggest one was, we are bringing in a Canadian business to the United States, which there’s a lot of differences and local nuances there with just the different countries. So just go a little bit in more to the people. So the fear of losing the job, as I said, was more trying to build a relationship with those people who are going to lose their jobs, which wasn’t easy. And so the way we started with this is we as a shared service, we would go to the location where they’re currently doing their accounts receivable work, meet with a team, they’re being able to try to be, you know, very compassionate, not come in, hey, we’re going to take over you need to show us all this stuff, just be very partnering with them, help them understand what’s going on, help them realize that this was a decision that the business made, and not necessarily that we made, we took them out to dinner, we played some did some team building games with them, just really try to get them to know them at a personal level. And help them understand that, you know, this is the situation that we’re in, you know, don’t really blame us. But let’s try to partner with this and make this as easy as possible. And a lot of it this, these people have worked there for years. And this was really their baby, something that they cared about a lot. So being able to make sure that we treated it that way, they could gain the trust that we are going to take over the work that they’ve been doing for years and still handle it well, I think made a big difference with them as well. And then we’d also go into these organizations and as we met with them, and we did these team-building things, we went out to dinner with them being able to find different people that we could say was there, there are champions, so someone who could we could really focus on who was an influencer in the organization that we were taking over, and being able to help them get on our side. So that even when we weren’t there, they were the ones that could still talk positively about it to help promote the change and promotes what’s going on. They’re the ones that we did video conferences with phone calls with to make sure we stay in contact with but we had different champions. And they were the more the influencers of that organization to help continue to drive this with hiring the right people. So why we’re doing that and working with closing down these different businesses making sure that we had our organization set, we really realize that we can we and I don’t mean to sound cocky, but we feel like we can teach anybody how to clear deduction, how to teach anybody how to apply cash application, we wanted to look more for some of those soft skills. So people that are self-driven, motivated, have initiative, you know, some of those other things that are harder. So if we found somebody who had a music degree, or a communications degree or something else that maybe wasn’t necessarily financially related, but they show those other aspects, we want those people to work for us, and we’d be willing to teach them some of those other things. And so to do that, we really had to change our interviewing style. So we focus more on behavior-related questions have more, you know, tell us about the experience when this happened, or, you know, and really try to focus on some of those things. And you could tell pretty quickly if the candidate was trying to make up an experience if they weren’t being truthful to us, you know, what’s going on to try to drive that and get those sort of people that had a lot of those soft skills, we weren’t so worried about, again, what their degree was in or what, you know, sort of X scale Excel skills they had, or some of those technical things, but really some of those soft things. And then if we were bringing in those people that had those soft skills, and we wanted to make sure that they were they felt empowered. So here’s a sample questionnaire, and I don’t know if anybody can see it, it’s kind of small. But here are some of the questions that, you know, that we were given that we use to try to get some of these more behavior-related candidates to show through.
Jacob Whetstone [8:47]
And then, you know, once we brought these people in just making sure that the training was set up nice, so that they felt that they could easily train come in have a low learning curve, being able to have a structured process, slides, different other things that they can refer back to. So even when the training was done, they always had something that they can refer back to. And a lot of the training was around technology. So that’s a lot of the reason why we were chosen to be that shared service center is because we had different technology. So we had to make sure that people were competent, and just the technology that they were using, as well as understanding how to clear adoption, the, you know, revenue cycle process and everything. And then with addressing the local nuances, just and you know, this fell under people even though a lot of this is related to our customer. So again, just with Canada, being able to where they spoke French up there, not forgetting that and not losing that we didn’t want them to see a US address being now their new point of contact, and not only talking to them in English or anything but making sure that they understood that we could still serve them as if we were a local company there in Canada. So, you know, every communication that we had we doubled it up. So we sent both English and French we didn’t worry necessarily about trying to identify those that only spoke English or those who spoke French we would just send both of them so that they could look at whatever They wanted. This next one is actually an example of an introduction letter that we had both the English and the French version again. So we could just send that out, make sure that they understood that we were willing to accommodate them and speak both languages if necessary. As far as the processes, just really trying to go in and understand the processes that need to happen that are unique to those businesses. So when we had Danone was, you know, kind of our mainstay as a company, and then as we brought different processes in we thought, okay, well, Danone’s, you know, pretty big company, I’m sure everybody else follows suit. So, Dan, and the majority of our customers are retail, we have a small channel that we call AFH, which is where you eat the product away from your home is what H stands for. So hospitals, restaurants, schools, gas stations, other places. And we thought, okay, everybody’s probably the same. And we brought the known waters in and it’s completely flipped. And that kind of threw us for a loop. So being able to understand how the business works, we can adjust our processes for that, that, you know, in that case, that retail wasn’t a big enough Vegas, but away from home was, so what do we need to change in order to accommodate that piece of it. And that’s where we thought we could plug and play what we had had for Danone into these other business units. But we realized that yes, there’s a lot of things that we can just put in place, but there’s a lot of things that we have to change as well. And, you know, even with Canada, there are different tax laws that when a customer, the ducks, they also deduct for a tax that we didn’t have to deal with in the US. So we had to develop processes around that. And so just really being able to make sure that we understood the differences in each business unit so that we can be prepared for them. As we were going through the processes, you know, this is kind of some steps of what we went through to figure it out. So we’d sit down with the individuals, the individual specialist, really try to understand what they were doing more just having them tell us to show us their day-to-day job shadowing, we didn’t get to anything of well, you know, we do this differently. Here, we do this, just really understanding what they do, why they do it, and then being able to be open-minded and realize that we might not have the best, best-in-class practice, that maybe something this other business unit doing is better for us. So are there things, we want to understand what they’re as his processes, but also the to be and when we were figuring out the to be some of the stuff we wanted to keep, we didn’t necessarily want to just go in and take over with the process that we already had in place in case some other things were better for us? When we were doing this with our new acquisition WhiteWave foods as we were looking at the two different ones, one of the things that stood out, and this is just a, you know, quick example, but one that was more recently relevant is our Posada claim process. So on the Danone side, we didn’t have a very good process for this, but White Way seemed to have a better process. And so this is one that we implemented across the board. And, and I don’t have in here, but from an accounting standpoint, they even implemented the accrual and how they reserved for their post audits differently based on what WhiteWave did. But from our side, we had to come up with some processes to incorporate that. So even one is as simple as being able to define a post-SATA. So we looked at the timing of when the deduction came in. If it was within a certain timeframe, regardless of if the third party auditor was doing it versus the customer. And they said it was a post-SATA, we still went by a timeframe versus what the deduction said. And then how we clear it made a difference as well. And again, that helped with the accrual that we had for the post audits. So just you know, a quick example of where this was the best process that we had in place. But as we went through and we shadowed, and we worked with these people, we realized that they had some better processes as well. So we want to implement those.
Jacob Whetstone [13:28]
And then on the technology side, definitely we have some challenges with our technology, being able to make it work. As I said, it wasn’t necessarily a plug and play, we wanted to we had very similar customers across the different customer bases. And for, you know, Danone sold over to Walmart, so did own waters are heavy on they also sold over to Walmart, we wanted to use the same customer numbers and separate by company code. And I presented some challenges when cash applications came in and separated the checks. So we had to figure some things out being able to use the company codes in SAP, being able to deal with many different manual processes that were going on any offline reporting that they had, how can we replicate that so the business still had a great need for this reporting. But their reporting was done in either their old system or the new system that we have. So we had to figure out how to bridge that gap to still get the business what they needed and what they required. So being able to figure out what we can extract from the system, what we can do to make sure that we meet all business needs, even though that we don’t have the same resources that they had. And then, again, with technology, just some of the best practices is one of the requirements that we had as Dinoland as a whole worldwide is moving to SAP and most of the business units are in SAP, so we did have to make sure that we had the same ERP system in order for this to work. So once a company went on SAP, then we were able to bring them into our shared service environment, but we needed that same ERP system there. And then also the same trade management system. So just being able to have Have where the salespeople plan their deals so that it flows through correctly. So we do have that requirement where they have to be at least on some basic systems before we can bring them in into a shared service. And to know worldwide had a goal to move businesses onto those systems anyway. So that’s why we’ll bring in some of these other ones when they go live on their systems. Alright, so I know he’s going through really quick here, but Phil’s with not a lot of people here, you can have some more questions. But so just some of the results that we have that we wanted to go through. And I show this slide in another presentation I did. But one of the best results that we had was with our cash application by moving into a shared service system. So we, out of all the businesses we brought in with so far as we had about eight people equivalent we had, we didn’t have necessarily eight people dedicate a lot of people to doing a cash application or doing other things. But we figure with those businesses, there were about eight people that were doing cash application, we’re able to bring it down to two people. So with all those deductions that are being created, all the checks are coming in, we can do it with two people because of the processes that we have in place with the technology that we have using that and I also have here some hit rates of some of the different businesses we have. So the D US has done on us. DWI is the waters business. And a D says the Canada business. And these are year over year. So for the Danone and the DWI business, those we had on HighRadius, both times in 2016, which is what those red lines are. So those ones were just continually trying to improve the business and improve our history. But that didn’t own Canada one of there ones that we brought into our shared service centers starting January 2017. And so in December 2016, they did their cash application 100%. Manually, it was they would either print out the check, or the bank or the EFT or they’d have it on a different screen, they go in st there is no autumn SAP, there’s no automation whatsoever. So that’s why they had 0%. And within eight months of us bringing it into our systems, our processes entire radius, we had a 95% hit rate. And what we were looking for was for a no-touch hit rate, we didn’t want to hit the rate where the file was processed, it came to us we manipulate the files more than send it to SAP, our hit rate was actually where we’re trying to get a no-touch that the bank processes it goes to HighRadius, and then it’s applied without anybody touching. And we were able to get up to 95% within eight months, which was a great selling point to the business a great proof that our shared service environment is working, and being able to add some immediate value back for what we were doing. And a lot of that was you know, the work that we did on the other businesses on both Danone and TWA, learning from our mistakes, learning from the processes that we have. So when you brought Canada on, that it was really smooth going forward. But then also KPI in the team on not only writing roles in HighRadius, or doing some technical aspects of it, but working with the bank, working with the customer and changing customers from check to EFT, working with the bank to get better quality images. So to carry through, but we did a lot of things to make sure that we had that. But again, it was a great sell to show that the shared service environment that we are creating was working.
Jacob Whetstone [18:06]
So some of the lessons we had, I didn’t type lesson learned. That’s not really how we talk, but it’s what it says But But what was really trying to overcome the learning curve that we had, so be unable to accelerate this as fast as we could. So again, we did a lot of stuff upfront. And every time we implemented a business, our implementation time got shorter and shorter. So being able to eliminate that learning curve and really partnering up getting the champions with the people getting other things. So that learning curve was the smallest possible. And then like so we were able to get better than ever results. So the cash application one was a great example. But we also track our production balance pretty closely. And that was another thing that we were able to really bring down was a production balance. That, you know, Canada, again, was a very good success story that we had been they were they were normally running very high. And we were able to get to numbers that they had never gotten before within that first year and again sold that everything. So we were able to get some best numbers that we’ve ever had before by bringing it in and making sure that we were prepared and learning from what’s happened before. So we brought the Danone business in the waters business, the candidate business was set to bring in some other businesses as we continue to move on this. And we’ll continue to build on this to create a shared service environment. So So that’s it. I know it was fast, but I didn’t I knew it wouldn’t take the whole time. So any questions? Yes. I can hear you.
Jacob Whetstone [20:32]
Okay, yeah. I mean, so to answer those two parts of your questions, so the first one, just to clarify, you want to just how did we get the management buy in to do a share service thing? Or to invest in the technology? Oh, yes. Okay. Okay, yeah, I mean, so I mean, the training without a doubt is very important, making sure that the team has the tools they need to succeed. And that’s where I think the I don’t, you know, I may not be answering your question, but it was hard to defer to pull apart the fact that we were bringing in a certain skill set of people versus the training, because if we were able to successfully hire those people, not every time we were, but those people who are self, you know, self-starters motivated, like the training for them didn’t have to be necessarily as intense because they were the type of people that they would go in, they would play around in the system, they would teach themselves, so sort of things, they would understand things that even people that we’re training them didn’t see, they ask questions to ask the why. And so the training for them was a little bit different. So if we were able to get those right people, so that’s where I say they’re very closely connected, because the training investment that we had was probably a lot less when we brought those right people in, and they came through it, those people that we sometimes missed on, because we definitely brought in some people that weren’t like that. Yeah, I mean, there was a big investment that we had to put in there. But there was also as we bring in more and more of these people, they realized that they were falling behind, and a lot of those people are left on their own, or they were able to step up and be able to help be that piece. So yeah, I don’t know, as far as you know, the management, everybody was all on board and training and understanding that piece of it. And it didn’t only have a very good training culture, so they want to make sure that you understand, but they also have training classes that encourage the people to take to just help them be better people in general that have nothing to do with their job. And so for them, that training thing was an easy piece of it. But I don’t know if that helps answer it or not. But as far as dealing with the two different languages, so we actually, when we brought Canada in, our goal was to hire somebody that was a French speaker to deal directly with those Quebec customers. And it honestly didn’t work out. So we, the Canada business was still there, we were just taking the AR piece of it from them. So we use them to draft letters, HighRadius, like for collection letters, we use an auto correspondence. And again, we send French letters and stuff. So we try to do it as much as we could without them knowing that we didn’t have a French speaker in the office. And like I say, this is Sarah, she’s one of my colleagues here. She was managing Canada and I think we did pretty good. I don’t know if we ever got a phone call like we were able to do most of it. A little French. So yeah, we limped along when we actually needed to, but for the most part, we didn’t we were able to do it. Yeah.
Audience [23:39]
Maybe we don’t have a lot of customers that are several there, but they always have. We haven’t had an issue. And there was one that we had at one time, but the salesperson. They just helped us with Virginia.
Ashley (Audience) [24:07]
Hi, my name’s Ashley. And with Coca-Cola, we’re in the process of implementing HighRadius, cash application deductions, collections, and web portal. And something we’ve been looking to kind of learn from others that have implemented is based on your business case when you were first looking at implementing in your estimates of savings. How did that compare to what you actually saved? So you showed you went from eight people to two people? And we’re at 95% Within eight months, but is that what you expected? Was it far better than what you expected? Or how did that really play out? Yeah, so
Jacob Whetstone [24:42]
I mean, on the candidate, that specific example was a lot better than what we expected to have. But again, a lot of that was because Canada was our it was actually our fourth implementation. There was another business that we implemented that we since sold, and so we were able to leverage a lot of what we learned and we underestimated what those learnings of the other implementations had in place. So that was a lot better result than what we actually had before. And again, it wasn’t just necessarily a cash application piece. We also on the production side, when we were bringing in these businesses, and we would look at how many specialists they had working the deductions, and then we had estimates of how many people would take on our end, which was always less than what they had before. But even on the candidate piece, we ended up with one less headcount than what we had planned for, just again, because we had better results than what we had thought. Some of the other ones, we actually probably underestimated a need to bring in another person. So we ended up kind of netting out, but we did. The Canada one was very successful, but it was built off the success that we had on the other ones and the things that we learned there.
Jacob Whetstone [25:45]
The first one was a little bit more, was a lot rougher, for sure. And so we were bringing in it was another company that we’ve since sold, but we expected, a lot bigger benefit from that than what we actually got. And a lot of it was because we, we thought we were better than what we were and we thought we could just plug and play. And that’s where that concept came in that we thought we could just do exactly what we’re doing on the Danone business with this new business. And that wasn’t the case, there were a lot more nuances. It was very organic, they sold organic yogurt business and they had a different set of customers the natural channel, which we didn’t have to deal with. And so that kind of threw us for a loop all those pieces, so it wasn’t necessarily as good. And that’s where by the time we got to Canada we had learned from that some of that stuff and wasn’t so prideful on what we were able to accomplish type things.
Steve (Audience) [26:36]
Hi, I’m Steve with Duracell. My question is in terms of actual AR metrics. Things like, you know, DSO, past dues deductions, what was the end result? Did your metrics improve?
Jacob Whetstone [26:55]
Yeah, so across the board, they improved. So we measured the so we made your past 2%. From the collection standpoint, from the deduction side, we measure our overall deduction, balance, and validate that we collect back so the repayment number that we get back in, as well as like, how fast so we call it a DRT deduction, resolution time how fast we resolve those deductions. And across the board, those improved and especially as we got further on. So even though we had some rough patches with our first implementation, over time, we had better results than that company did a loan in their history of being able to track those numbers. So all the businesses, we’ve had the best results out of what any historical number they’ve kept track of.
Steve (Audience) [27:32]
Thank you.
Julie (Audience) [27:42]
Hi, I’m Julie from Loblaw companies limited in Canada. One of the things that I just want to pick your brain about is really about the decentralized model coming into a shared service. So currently, we actually have implemented the deductions, the collections and the Cash App has been our biggest focus so far. So we have one legal entity or a few legal entities that are capitalizing on the shared services platform. However, we acquired a new company a few years back, and we’re finally having those conversations about potentially bringing that into a shared service. So one of the things we struggled with the implementation, the first implementation with HighRadius was a lack of expected resources for the actual project. So and we have shared services at that point in time. So bringing in, in your professional opinion, bringing in a company that’s potentially a lot larger, from a decentralized to a centralized model and really focusing on Cash App, and the deductions and collections that we currently have. What about how big of a team should we really be building to successfully bring this on?
Jacob Whetstone [28:56]
Yeah, so when we first implemented HighRadius, We took the approach where we expected a lot of savings. So we staffed for those savings. And our original invitation was horrible. So and this was back when we were just standing, and we were trying to bring in cash applications and deductions. So we weigh underestimated that and we felt the pain for that, or deduction balance went higher than ever, you know, we had people find out from our corporate headquarters when or what’s going on and everything. And then we went back to HighRadius, and we actually did a reimplementation. And where we were able to then try to correct all that stuff. But then we, we took the approach of overstaffing for that, because we didn’t want to have that same resource problem. So I would say, you know, and I know it’s, you know, people’s lives in Java, whatever, but, but lean on the side, if possible, have to overstaff realizing that efficiencies are going to come but they’re not going to come right away. So even, you know, our Canada was the great result. But that was still eight months. And over eight months, as I said, we’ve hired some of the wrong people that self-selected to leave so we were able to some of those people that we overstaffed, just plug into those places others have and we were able to create different opportunities for them. But, you know, again, if I misunderstand your question, let me know. But for us, we failed on the first implementation by understaffing and expecting to have some savings and trying to work with those savings right away versus overstaffing. And as little savings come, you know, trying to reduce the headcount at that point. But yeah,
Julie [30:18]
just one more question. So you were talking about your team being 54 individuals, including management. Can you tell me how you have those separated as far as your deductions cash, like a Cash App? Did you mention it? There are two full-time people you have five companies, legal entities within your SAP? Yeah, yeah.
Jacob Whetstone [30:33]
Yeah. Five now.
Julie Audience [30:35]
So I’m just trying to understand the grouping, or how many people are doing white, and the volume of transactions that you’re actually managing today? Sure.
Jacob Whetstone [30:46]
Yeah. So for us, we have the cash application team as a separate team, and they apply the cash for all of those different entities. So those ones we’ve kept separate were on the deduction and the collection side, we’ve broken that out a little bit more and were because of the different nuances in each of the businesses, it made sense for us to separate those out. So we have our, our Danone US business, which is down, and why waive that they have their own set of specialists, and there’s probably 80 deductions, I don’t know, some. So my numbers might be off, I’m trying to pull off my head, but they have different specialists that are focused on that. And we’re separated by regions of the company, which also align with our sales team. So we wanted our sales team to be able to have one point of contact. So for Danone’s salesperson who’s over the Midwest or whatever, they’re only going to call and they just have to talk to one person to get all the answers that they want. So we’re aligned by region. And then with each of those reasons, regions, we have one collector that does the collections for all of those that region, but we’re separated down and has their own deduction specialists only work on the Dinan product. And then we have a company called Earthbound Farms, which accident show and there they didn’t own Canada’s is separated. So from those standpoints, we are separate a little bit. But it made sense with all the different customer behavior, where the credit, the evaluations, that centralized, we just have two people doing credit for all of our businesses, as I said, two people doing cash application. And the rest is those deduction specialists that are separated by the businesses. But we had to do that because of the different nuances. We tried to combine it all and have deduction specialists work the deductions for it. So they would own Kroger and they would have to work. All the companies that own Kroger and it was just too difficult to do. They had different portals, different vendor numbers, just a lot of differences that we just didn’t have the efficiencies that we were hoping for. So volumes, so that number on there, I had, like we had over $500,000 deductions that came through, as far as I don’t know, Sarah, you know, invoices applied, or how much cash application metrics that we didn’t say I don’t mind sharing with, you may have to get back to you with that. But overall, you know, whatever cash led to that we’re pretty credit Light Company, we mainly deal with the big customers, you’re actually one of our customers, we deal with the big customers, and then a lot of wholesalers, so we really don’t deal with a lot of the mom and pop shops. So for us, credit is a very light thing. And that’s where we’re able to deal with just two people on the credit side.
Sam(Audience) [33:08]
Hi, Sam here again. So going back to this slide, like on the efficiency part, I think, like 2016 was around 60 63% is I think what I remember seeing go back to this one here? Yep. Okay, so it’s at 76 and 63 was the DW wave one. Yeah. So initially, when you started like in 2016, after implementation, let’s say what was the number like like, let’s say, initially, after implementation, you do have your, let’s say three months of phase where you kind of monitor things and actually look at the productivity or the hit rate of cash application. So one was on that and let’s say on the Canada piece, like how standardized or your remittance is so for that you’re looking at right now like because mainly the cash application is driven based on your standard form of payments and remittances that you receive so that it’s easier for HighRadius to apply them across. Right. So that’s what we are struggling with as a challenge right now. So on those lines, do you have any inputs? Yeah.
Jacob Whetstone [34:16]
So I mean, when we first started with these both TWA and can’t, sorry, the US they were probably around the high 30, or 40%. So they were a lot lower. And a lot of it was because as we implemented this, we needed to go in and do a lot of work. So we worked really closely with HighRadius to be able to where they weren’t standardized, being able to try to figure out custom rules, custom mapping, or whatever so that we could read the files as they came in. We also noticed for all of our businesses, and this kind of answers, I guess your other question a little bit on the Canada piece. As for us, five customers make up 90% of our Canada business and all of our transactions. So for those five customers, even if they weren’t standard, as long as we were able to write specific, very specific rules related to those five, our hit rate shot through the roof, because it was those five drills such a big business of it. But it was even with the DWI. And the USPS with it wasn’t five, it was like a top 10 or 15, that that drove the majority of our business. So as long as we focused on those ones, many rules, different changes to handle that piece of it, then we’re able to drive our hit-rate up, though I said a lot of it was also working with the customers to switch from paying us by cheque to EFT, we’re able to get a lot of hit with that especially a DWI, that was a very cheque based business. And customers were willing to switch over with that. But then we also went back to our bank, we use Citibank. And we noticed that the images that they were sending over the checks were very poor quality. So working with them to even scan at a higher quality, really some reduce some of the noise so that the O RC technology can read it better with that Canada for whatever reason we use HSBC, and that’s a very high-quality image. And the RC worked a lot better with us so it could pick it up. So just by working with the bank, working with the customers, we were able to shoot our percent up and that’s where even that red number was there with HighRadius in place. But we still have metrics and KPIs on our cash application team to keep increasing that by both changing roles in the system but also changing customer behavior and working with the banks and things.
