Improving Customer Experience, Time Savings and Environmental Factors Help Clients Choose Blackline EIPP and Cash App
AAH is a leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products serving pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors nationwide. In the UK, AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd is the largest pharmaceutical wholesaler.
The Challenge
AAH Pharmaceuticals (AAH) operates a very complex business at enormous scale, ensuring pharmaceuticals reach healthcare facilities—and end patients—as soon as possible.
“We work with 30,000 live customers at any one time, dispatching 26,000 products to every single pharmacy, the National Health Service, and general practitioner practices across the United Kingdom,” says George Kerr, Senior Credit Manager.
AAH customers often receive multiple deliveries a day, from 20 totes in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. Each tote contains multiple product boxes—and an invoice.
“A customer with 25 daily totes would receive 25 invoices,” says Kerr. “We were generating 130,000 paper invoices per day. That’s 3.2 million invoices with line-item detail every month.”
Generating, tracking, and receiving payment for millions of invoices created tremendous manual work for AAH credit management teams. “Our cash application required 20 staff at peak times and 14 during the rest of the month,” says Kerr. “At any one time, we were four days behind schedule and had £40-£50m unallocated.”
The manual invoice process didn’t just affect our credit management team. It also created extra labour at the warehouse and increased costs, both financially and environmentally.
Why BlackLine
Kerr and his team researched and tested several cloud-based invoice-to-cash and cash application solutions. Any solution had to handle not only their intense volume and 45-year-old self-built ERP, but also enable line-item-level data needed for each invoice.
Kerr knew that one of their sister companies, LPCH, relied on BlackLine’s eInvoicing solution. The cloud-based invoicing solution receives data from any ERP, often multiple ERPs, and turns orders into invoices, while Cash Application instantly and accurately applies cash payments, reducing unallocated cash by up to 99%.
“We compared BlackLine with another potential provider and saw that BlackLine was by far the better solution,” says Kerr. “Internal testing showed that not only was it easy to use but our users loved how it streamlined and automated their manual work.”
During implementation, the BlackLine team was “very helpful,” says Kerr “They were open to discussion and highly skilled, which meant we were able to keep things rolling efficiently, despite our extremely old system and excessive amounts of data.”
The Results
AAH Pharmaceuticals Group successfully digitized and automated the delivery of 130,000 daily invoices to 30,000 customers. Today, when a customer orders product, AAH Pharmaceutical’s warehouse system creates an invoice. The warehouse data uploads to the ERP every night, and the data then transfers to BlackLine eInvoicing & Payments. By 10 am, customers receive a reminder and can log in and access their invoices from the previous day.
The entire process works “really, really well,” says Kerr.
“It works better than we imagined. We place a lot of trust in it because we’ve seen that it gets the right invoices to the right people very quickly. When anyone asks me about BlackLine, I tell them, ‘If you have horrific volumes like we do, stop thinking about it. Just do it. BlackLine is worth it.’”
Reduced time spent on cash application by 75% and unallocated cash by 97%. Previously, staff were four days behind posting cash.
“With BlackLine Cash Application, we’ve reduced our cash application time to one day, giving us more visibility and real-time data,” says Kerr. “We’ve also reduced our unallocated cash by 97%, from £40-£50m to less than £1.5m.”
Increased efficiency and freed staff time. By automating cash application, AAH Pharmaceuticals has freed up 16 staff members for more analytical and value-added work.
“Before BlackLine, we needed 20 people during peak times to work on cash application,” says Kerr. “Now we only need a team of four.”
In addition, the invoicing team no longer spends the bulk of the day fielding phone calls or copying invoices. “With BlackLine eInvoicing & Payments, we’re doing far more outbound chasing and other value-added work.”
Reduced financial and environmental costs. Previously, AAH Pharmaceuticals printed and delivered 3.2 million invoices every month.
“Since switching to BlackLine, we’ve saved £125,000 a year on paper alone,” says Kerr. “And we’re not generating 125 tons of CO2 every year, wasting paper and ink.”
In the future, AAH Pharmaceutical’s attention to sustainability will continue to pay dividends: environmental efforts can help an organisation increase brand loyalty, stand out from the competition, and even experience higher gains. Sustainability also affects retention: 70% of employees surveyed stated that an organisation’s sustainability program was a factor in remaining with the company long term.
Streamlined the customer experience.
With BlackLine, invoices also reach the right people in a timely manner.
“Invoices in the totes didn’t always reach payers right away. Sometimes customers would save them for a week and then walk them over to the accounts payable departments,” says Kerr. “Now, every invoice is available the next morning.”
Improved visibility. BlackLine eInvoicing & EIPP provides the kind of visibility simply not available in AAH Pharmaceuticals’ current ERP.
“Our ERP is a greenscreen environment. We use F keys to manoeuvre around. If we want to see a whole invoice, we have to email ourselves a PDF of the document,” says Kerr.
“Contrast that with the BlackLine portal, where we just call up the account, type in the invoice number, and bang, there it is. It’s so accessible that it we also rely on it as our archive.”
Gained product storage—and more sales capability. More warehouse space was an “unexpected” benefit of the reduction in printing.
“We have 11 warehouses. Some of those warehouses were storing 20+ pallets of invoicing paper,” says Kerr. “By using BlackLine, we’ve increased our sales capability. We can store more products, instead of stationery. And the more product we have in the warehouse, the more efficiently we can deliver to customers.”
Hospital & Healthcare
SAP
Europe
Midsize
Automated the delivery of 130,000 daily invoices to 30,000 customers
Streamlined the customer experience
Increased efficiency and freed staff time
Improved visibility
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