For businesses that serve large client companies, providing a quality customer experience is a high priority. For food manufacturer, Land O’Lakes, to improve its customer experience, the company needed to streamline its deductions management. In this Acceleration Case Study, learn how Land O’Lakes implemented an automation solution to make these improvements. By partnering with HighRadius, the company had an 18% increase in resolved deductions and a 9% reduction in DSO.
Business Challenge – Finding a Way to Automate Deductions
Land O’Lakes is an agricultural cooperative and food manufacturing company, specializing in the dairy industry. The company needed to find a better way to manage a high volume of deductions. Their 12 largest customers contributed to over half of the deductions. The company especially had to improve the customer experience for these top customers.
- The company recognized its need for an automated solution to manage its high volume of deductions. Its current deductions management had a few pain points:
- Two different teams managed deductions involving pricing, shortages, and trade promotions
- 21% of their customers claimed deductions, resulting in over 100,000 deductions annually
- Gathering information was time consuming and complex
Because analysts interacted with three to four disconnected systems, automating the deduction process was essential. For instance, one analyst even averaged 22 daily deductions. These analysts manually gathered backup documents from various sources, such as emails, website portals, lockbox files, EDI, and paper documents. Furthermore, the process was spread across multiple systems, such as Revitas for Deductions, Oracle JDE ERP, and Stellent for document management.
- Land O’Lakes’ goal for the solution was clear:
- Streamline the deductions process
- Manage and blend interconnected systems
- Low integration costs
- Compatible with the most recent software
- Eliminate low-value manual taks
Software Solution – HighRadius
HighRadius is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. It uses Autonomous Systems and AI technology to help businesses automate various tasks. By choosing to partner with HighRadius, it enabled Land O’Lakes to streamline the deduction process. All of the information was in one place. Now, a deduction analyst begins the day by checking an automated worklist that shows the deductions assigned for each person. Afterward, the analysts can start immediately resolving deductions. So, this saves everyone a lot of time and effort.
HighRadius also helped them to use the same system for managing valid and invalid deductions. A valid deduction is automatically resolved within the system while a disputed deduction is sent to the correspondence tab in the same window. Using the correspondence tab makes it possible for analysts to obtain additional documents for resolving.
In the header, they capture basic details involving the payment for the deduction. Beneath the header, they have listed multiple tabs to assist the analyst in closing a deduction. For a much quicker resolution process, the system automatically captures claim information and links it to each deduction.
The Results
The implementation of HighRadius made it possible to streamline the deduction process and improve efficiency. Furthermore, automation now handles the process of finding backup documents, coding deductions, and populating claim data. It also automatically populates various deduction attributes, whether the customer’s name, planning account, reason code, priority, or deduction claims line-item data.
Once a deduction is ready for research, a deduction analyst will take over the remaining process. Using HighRadius boosted productivity for Land O’Lakes within three months. Additionally, they experienced other benefits like a significant decrease in manual work, improved analyst efficiency, and increased broker confidence.
Choosing to partner with HighRadius resulted in an 18% increase in the number of deductions resolved, two million dollars in closed reductions, and a 9% reduction in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). All of these benefits further highlight the critical role of using HighRadius to automate a variety of tasks. Land O’Lakes plans to continue to use this innovative software to better meet the needs of their customers by further expediting the entire deduction process.
