Arla Foods Claim Management
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Arla Foods Claims Management Case study: products ordered by the retailer are compared to the the products received, and claims made where there is a discrepancy. The ePODs and GRNs were received in customer-specific formats with some retrieved from retailers’ online systems. References quoted in the documentation were also retailer-specific, and needed converting to Arla’s own language format before they could be manually entered into the ERP system. As a result, an Arla team had to spend time retrieving the electronic PODs and GRNs, printing them and then going through them line-by-line to identify any discrepancies. They were then required to manually input them into the system. Ian Singleton, General Manager of Logistics Support at Arla, who spearheaded the project, comments: “One member of the Logistics Support Team could spend a whole day going through just one major retailer’s delivery discrepancies. They would then do the same for our third party customers as well as process delivery claims received from our other retail customers, reducing the time available to investigate and defend claims.” Arla produces and distributes its own products, turning over 1.7 billion pounds per annum, and it also makes deliveries on behalf of other leading consumer goods companies like Danone, Kerry and Bel. Arla makes 4,000 deliveries to stores and regional distribution centres every day. How claims used to be processed All of this activity meant that prior to implementing the OmPrompt service, Arla’s Logistics Support Team received 2,500 electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) and goods received notes (GRNs) containing 70,000 lines of data per week for one customer. Many of these documents include lines of data where the Ever heard of Cravendale, Anchor or Lurpak? Arla is the company behind the most recog- nised dairy brands and is the UK’s largest dairy company. “33% of delivery discrepancies are now automatically validated. The impact of the service on the team and Arla has been extremely positive.”
Transcript of Arla Foods Claim Management
Arla Foods Claims Management
Case study:
products ordered by the retailer are compared to the the products received, and claims made where there is a discrepancy.
The ePODs and GRNs were received in customer-specific formats with some retrieved from retailers’ online systems. References quoted in the documentation were also retailer-specific, and needed converting to Arla’s own language format before they could be manually entered into the ERP system.
As a result, an Arla team had to spend time retrieving the electronic PODs and GRNs, printing them and then going through them line-by-line to identify any discrepancies. They were then required to manually input them into the system.
Ian Singleton, General Manager of Logistics Support at Arla, who spearheaded the project, comments: “One member of the Logistics Support Team could spend a whole day going through just one major retailer’s delivery discrepancies.
They would then do the same for our third party customers as well as process delivery claims received from our other retail customers, reducing the time available to investigate and defend claims.”
Arla produces and distributes its own products, turning over 1.7 billion pounds per annum, and it also makes deliveries on behalf of other leading consumer goods companies like Danone, Kerry and Bel. Arla makes 4,000 deliveries to stores and regional distribution centres every day.
How claims used to be processedAll of this activity meant that prior to implementing the OmPrompt service, Arla’s Logistics Support Team received 2,500 electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) and goods received notes (GRNs) containing 70,000 lines of data per week for one customer. Many of these documents include lines of data where the
Ever heard of Cravendale, Anchor or Lurpak? Arla is the company behind the most recog-nised dairy brands and is the UK’s largest dairy company.
“33% of delivery discrepancies are now automatically validated. The impact of the service on the team and Arla has been extremely positive.”
suppliers are forced to use manual workarounds (people) to fill the gaps.
Removing that manual intervention was a major requirement for the Arla project. OmPrompt combines technology, people and process to provide multi-format support, accelerated exception management and intelligent business rules.
The stimulus for change came when Arla announced it was to merge with Milk Link, another large dairy co-operative. As well as being the UK’s largest producer of cheese, Milk Link supplies a full range of dairy products to major retailers, which meant additional workload and a significant increase in pressure for Arla’s Logistics Support Team.
Arla had already worked with OmPrompt on a customer automation management project, which had seen the computerisation of 50% of Arla’s 33,000 manual orders. This enabled four full-time staff to be allocated to other value-added activity. Based on this success, Arla’s logistics team chose to engage OmPrompt to automate inbound claims and reduce the administrative load of processing delivery discrepancies.
Out with the old, in with the newOmPrompt introduced Arla to Claims Management, one of the managed services within OmPrompt’s Customer Automation Management portfolio. The platform connects suppliers to their customers, throughout the order-to-cash process. Whilst automation of these processes is not new, OmPrompt recognises the balance of power favours the customer in the customer-supplier relationship and is able to embrace transactional diversity; without this ability
Case study:Arla Foods
Having studied Arla’s situation, OmPrompt approached claims processing from two angles, first looking at automating manual filtering and data entry, and then looking at automating manual validation of delivery discrepancies.
Today, Arla’s customers continue to send delivery claims in their preferred formats. The ePODs and GRNs are forwarded to OmPrompt service, which looks at the different layouts, identifies and extracts the required data, and applies the business rules to translate it into Arla-specific records, such as product and store references.
Every month the service examines and evaluates the data contained in two million fields to produce a clean list of daily claims – and that’s just for one customer.
OmPrompt Claims Management uses logic to dispose of huge amounts of unnecessary information, such as past reports that are automatically appended to the latest delivery discrepancy list from retailers, and thousands of lines of information comparing product ordered to product received but where no discrepancy exists.
The Logistics Support Team can now focus on value-added activity such as investigating large discrepancies.
Prior to implementing the OmPrompt service, Arla received 2,500 ePODs and GRNs per week.
About OmPromptAs the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt is helping a growing number of the world’s leading brands to eliminate gaps in their order-to-cash processes that have previously required manual workarounds.
OmPrompt’s innovative approach to automating repetitive work in the customer management cycle is enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restrictions and eliminate risks to their business.
Based in Oxfordshire UK, OmPrompt processes transactions for global brands in 35 countries on five continents.
Learn moreTo learn more about how customer automation management could help your organisation achieve transactional excellence, download our latest white paper at http://offers.omprompt.com/cam
OmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton ParkAbingdonOxfordshireOX14 4RQUK
+44 (0)1235 436000
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Many organisations have already achieved dramatic efficiency improve-ments in their procure-to-pay cycles by driving their suppliers to adopt standardised processes and technol-ogy solutions such as eInvoicing. At first glance, we may think that the same gains can be achieved by implementing a similarly standardised approach to the processes within the order-to-cash cycle.
But here’s the challenge: the standard-ised, simplifying mind-set that has worked so effectively in increasing procure-to-pay efficiencies will struggle to cope with the diverse range of customer message formats and business processes that are inevitable in any complex business environment.In fact, insisting on a rigid, stan-dardised approach to processing orders runs a real risk of alienating the customers your sales force has worked so hard to acquire. In most competitive
Introduction
3. OmPrompt. Using arrows to make stars of your customer facing team.
business environments, suppliers have to find ways of accommodating the many diverse ways with which their customers choose to place orders.This is why, in most markets, EDI has only succeeded in automating part of the order processing workload – the generally accepted figures lie somewhere between 30–70%. The remaining orders are received in a variety of formats that typically involve some form of manual intervention at one or more stages in the order-to-cash cycle.
This diversity is not just restricted to order formats: increasingly, customers have specific requirements and expectations in other areas. They may, for example, want consignment stock, vendor-managed inventory or call-off orders managed and reported on in a certain way. Or they may expect any returns to be managed according to their own defined process.
Accommodating these customer- specific process requirements can become a condition of doing business with their organisation – and assuming that we do not wish to turn their business away, we need to find ways of dealing with the customer’s expecta-tions. All-too-often, this creates yet another set of customer-specific workarounds.
Trying to impose standards on their operational diversity can easily alienate your hard-won customers.
Customer contact resources that should be focused on delivering a superior customer experience are being repeatedly redirected to bridging the gaps in back office processes.
Is it really possible to deliver
superior customer service and
transactional excellence at
the same time?
OmPrompt Executive Briefing
Using arrows to
make stars of
your customer
facing teams.
Many retailers give suppliers a limited time period to respond to any claims. During the investigation period, it is not uncommon for the retailer to send further updates to the GRN – or even withdraw the claim – as more stock is received into their systems. The OmPrompt service works non-stop amending the original claims, which ensures that discrepancies reported to Arla will be the final claims requiring investigation.
Importantly, the OmPrompt service enables the retailer’s GRN data to be compared to that stored in the supplier’s ERP system providing automatic validation of delivery discrepancies.
The BenefitsIan Singleton comments: “Every day the team now receives a clean list of delivery claims that are ready to be processed, giving them more time to analyse and thoroughly investigate claims. Thirty three per cent of delivery discrepancies are now automatically validated. The impact of the service on the team and Arla has been extremely positive.”
With the new system now in place, logistics support can now concentrate on activities that add value to Arla. Looking for patterns and trends in delivery discrepancies can unveil specific problems, which can now be identified and addressed.
Ian adds: “They are now able to look at the combined claims for a retailer and identify trends. Previously, we didn’t have this capability as we were only able to look at each claim individually. Thanks to OmPrompt we are now able to identify the root cause of claims”.
A glimpse of the futureOmPrompt Claims Management has allowed Arla’s logistics support to focus on value-added activity, such as investigating large discrepancies.Arla is so pleased with the results it is planning to extend OmPrompt’s Claim Management to more retail and third party customers. It has also engaged OmPrompt to streamline customer complaints processing.
“OmPrompt combines technology, people and process to provide multi-format support, accelerated exception management and intelligent business rules.”
