A Digital Supplier Portal for Supply Chain Finance in Action
Published on 21 Aug,2020
Client’s Supply Chain Snapshot
One of our clients is a top manufacturing and EPC conglomerate, with factories in multiple locations and a large, fragmented supplier base distributed across India.
Problem Statement
The company followed a lengthy and rigid process for supplier payments, illustrated below
- After a Supplier successfully bid for the company’s tender, the Corporate would raise a Purchase Order to the Supplier
- The Supplier then provides required goods, and issues an ASN upon beginning the process of delivery
- Company recieves the goods and a Goods Receipt Notice (GRN) is issued to the Supplier, followed by a lengthy Quality Control (QC) period of evaluating the goods
- Finally, post goods acceptance, the Supplier raises an invoice, against which payment is eventually made by the Corporate
- All processes carried out manually, with little or no digital intervention
- No visibility for the Supplier between GRN and Invoice
- Time spillages and lengthy gaps between each stage of the cycle
- Multiple teams involved; large manpower costs to the Corporate to execute the entire approval process
- Time taken between the GRN issue and Invoice acceptance extended to >50 days
- Lengthy processing time ate up the Supplier’s credit period, preventing it from availing of any financing against these orders
Solution Provided
- CredAble migrated the Corporate client to its digital supplier portal, along with all its suppliers
- Portal customized to the Corporate’s specific needs
- Platform enabled the Corporate to streamline all its processes
- Platform gave 100% visibility to the Supplier at every stage of the invoicing cycle
- Paper trails eliminated by automation of the processes thanks to the digital supplier portal
- CredAble leveraged its relationship with the Corporate to shrink the entire approval process to increase available credit periods for Suppliers on the digital supplier portal
- End-to-end digitization of supply chain operations, right from Purchase Requisition to Payment
Result Witnessed
- Suppliers were able to shrink their invoicing approval turnaround time by 65%
- This in turn improved the relationship between the Corporate and its Suppliers
- Suppliers given access to both pre-invoice and post-invoice funding by integrating with CredAble’s dynamic discounting platform on the digital supplier portal
- With visibility on the automated process, Suppliers were able to receive pre-invoice funding from CredAble basis GRN approval, reducing their cash-to-cash cycle by > 85%
- Monthly fixed costs reduced for Corporate by ~15%, resulting in a direct EBITDA increase