Industry
Manufacturing
Revenue
$32.3 Billion
Employees
10,000 +
Headquarters
Zurich, Switzerland
Our ultimate target is to apply cash before breakfast. This presents benefits to customers as well as giving us more transparency that, in turn, enables our collection teams to be more effective.
ABB are one of the world’s leading technology companies, with 50 subsidiaries around the world and revenue in excess of $32bn annually.
ABB’s cash application challenges
Faced with a fragmented global cash application environment driven by over 130 years of different local priorities, technology solutions, and operational and regulatory requirements, ABB struggled to apply incoming cash efficiently and lacked meaningful visibility into working capital at all levels of the business.
In this environment, centralizing the process on a global level made perfect sense, as it would allow the business to cut costs for local solutions and increase efficiency and transparency on a step-by-step basis.
Key facts:
ABB’s transformation approach – “cash before breakfast”
To modernize their cash application processes, ABB embarked on an internal transformation initiative called “Cash Applied Before Breakfast” (CABB) with the key objective of establishing a unified process across all group countries, with standardized reporting on applied and unapplied cash.
They chose Serrala as their partner for this initiative because of our solution’s capacity to integrate seamlessly with SAP ERPs, provide user-maintained business rule creation and adjustment to minimize IT involvement and maximize continuous improvement potential, and drastically reduce manual effort required for a variety of cash application processes across different regulatory and cultural areas.
The result – a single, automated source of truth for all credit workflows
The implementation of AutoBank has led to an increased matching rate in all of ABB’s subsidiaries (across approximately 80 bank accounts, 20 company codes, and 1300 daily line items), even those that previously already had SAP standard or an external solution in place.
Benelux, for example, used an extensively developed SAP standard, but ABB was still able to increase automation rate further from 60% to 80% thanks to AutoBank. In addition, the new standardized process saves a lot of time, eliminates maintenance of Excel spreadsheets and manual follow up on open items, has ended reliance on paper documents, and allows instant reporting with the push of a button.
ABB are one of the world’s leading technology companies, with 50 subsidiaries around the world and revenue in excess of $32bn annually.
ABB’s cash application challenges
Faced with a fragmented global cash application environment driven by over 130 years of different local priorities, technology solutions, and operational and regulatory requirements, ABB struggled to apply incoming cash efficiently and lacked meaningful visibility into working capital at all levels of the business.
In this environment, centralizing the process on a global level made perfect sense, as it would allow the business to cut costs for local solutions and increase efficiency and transparency on a step-by-step basis.
Key facts:
ABB’s transformation approach – “cash before breakfast”
To modernize their cash application processes, ABB embarked on an internal transformation initiative called “Cash Applied Before Breakfast” (CABB) with the key objective of establishing a unified process across all group countries, with standardized reporting on applied and unapplied cash.
They chose Serrala as their partner for this initiative because of our solution’s capacity to integrate seamlessly with SAP ERPs, provide user-maintained business rule creation and adjustment to minimize IT involvement and maximize continuous improvement potential, and drastically reduce manual effort required for a variety of cash application processes across different regulatory and cultural areas.
The result – a single, automated source of truth for all credit workflows
The implementation of AutoBank has led to an increased matching rate in all of ABB’s subsidiaries (across approximately 80 bank accounts, 20 company codes, and 1300 daily line items), even those that previously already had SAP standard or an external solution in place.
Benelux, for example, used an extensively developed SAP standard, but ABB was still able to increase automation rate further from 60% to 80% thanks to AutoBank. In addition, the new standardized process saves a lot of time, eliminates maintenance of Excel spreadsheets and manual follow up on open items, has ended reliance on paper documents, and allows instant reporting with the push of a button.
Merck has largely automated its credit and receivables management by introducing a comprehensive order-to-cash solution that includes credit and risk management as well as collections and disputes management.
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Implementing a value-based IT infrastructure for better payments, cash application, cash management and treasury.
