Problem

A $900M business services firm was unable to capture revenue, generate accurate invoices, and build any operational data to drive decision-making.  This also created a cashflow problem because employees were paid every 2 weeks but some invoices took 90 days to collect and some work was not even being billed

Action

• Document existing workflow from sales order entry to an invoice being paid

• Implement a basic work ticketing system to capture all work being performed
  
• Instead of manual keying in of work requests, provide a “click-driven” series of steps to identify work to be performed.  This quickly cleaned up invoice line items to ensure invoices had accurate content
• Scrub customer data to ensure invoices go to the correct location on the first mailing
• Implement aging reports to drive daily operations which also eliminated “forgotten” work requests

• Train all key administrative and management staff

Results

• Blank page to pilot within 90 days

• 100% revenue capture

• Invoice accuracy increased so much that the invoicing and re-invoicing work that used to require (5) full-time Billing Clerks was reduced to a single half-time employee.  This allowed an increased focus on collections to further improve cashflow.

• Improved sales staff productivity by reducing their order entry steps

• Eliminated data being manually re-entered into (3) disparate systems

• Automated daily reconciliation reports allowing administrative staff to focus on follow-up instead of generating reports they had no time to actually use.