Finance and Accounting Process Improvement

Client Need: 

A large apparel company experiencing significant growth wanted to establish an effective credit and collections function to keep up with new demands while running day-to-day finance and accounting operations.

Challenge

Due to rapid growth, the existing credit and collections function was not efficient or scaled for growth. Policies and procedures across multiple processes were, in some cases, non-existent, outdated or not well defined.  System limitations required significant manual intervention to release orders, issue customer statements, and process invoicing.  Over $3.9 million AR Aging over 120 days due to slow returns processing in the warehouse

Approach:

• Our Protiviti and Robert Half team was initially engaged to perform an assessment of the credit and collections processes by investigating the current state, analyzing findings, and aligning recommendations for improvement with industry best practices 
• As the implementation progressed, Protiviti was asked to assume the project lead with an integrated staffing team structure for various work streams, including resale certificate collection and guidelines, Avalara CertCapture data clean up, reservation/hold orders process, order allocations/backorders, sample program management, customer returns process, ERP/IT training and facilitation, phone system implementation, employee expense reports process, etc.
• Provided training and organizational change management support throughout various business transformational initiatives

Results:

• Enabled more effective coordination across several groups throughout the organization
• Overhauled customer returns process, improving time to issue credit from months to 24-to-48-hour turnaround
• Reduced customer return transactions requiring manual touchpoints by 75%
• Implemented company-wide phone system for over 400 employees, including customer service call center
• Facilitated management, hiring and onboarding to enable client to staff over 30 temporary resources for various positions, including customer service call center reps, holiday reps, AR, AP, HR, IT and production