Distribution

Overview

AVOLENT automates the bill-to-cash cycle, improves customer intimacy and satisfaction, reduces operating costs, and addresses the shortcomings of EDI.

Industry Drivers
Manufacturers are facing a new unexpected challenge brought on by recent advances in supply chain management. As manufacturers' customers are increasingly looking to reduce overhead and focus on their core competencies, other non-strategic elements (such as inventory management, replenishment, forecasting, etc.) are being forced up the supply chain to become the manufacturer's burden.

Challenges We Address
This shift puts an increasing burden on manufacturers' A/R, Collections, and Treasury teams as the nature of the bill-to-cash process changes - larger volumes of smaller bills, more adjustments to bills, and more collaboration required to accurately track, bill, and receive payment.

Manufacturers are one of the largest users of trade terms to accelerate cash flow, often sacrificing as much as 1-2% of gross margin using trade discounts such as "2% net 10". As pressure to maintain and improve margins continues, it becomes critical to understand how and why customers use trade terms to ensure minimal impact to gross margins.

EDI - once thought to be the solution for financial supply chain automation - has fallen far short on its potential, in part because EDI addresses only transaction delivery, not the customer collaboration required to resolve issues and discrepancies for timely payment. In this new era, manufacturers must be able to:

• Handle a larger volume of smaller value transactions
• Accurately and efficiently bill and collect for these transactions
• Assume more of the responsibility for getting paid in a timely fashion
• More strategically manage trade discounts to protect margin and cash
• Manage increased financial strain resulting from longer payment terms (such as net 60 or longer)
• Address shortcomings in using EDI
• Handle this additional administrative overhead without passing on increased costs to the customer

Benefits We Provide

The AVOLENT Solution: AVOLENT for Manufacturers
For manufacturers who must address the increased financial supply chain overhead brought on by new customer demands, AVOLENT is an enterprise software solution that automates the bill-to-cash cycle, improves customer intimacy, and reduces administrative overhead, all without increasing headcount. AVOLENT also addresses the shortcomings of EDI by automating interactions such as reconciliation and dispute resolution, previously handled only through phone calls and manual intervention. With AVOLENT, manufacturers gain the following advantages:

• Shifting paper billing to electronic transactions
• Automate processes such as reconciliation and dispute resolution
• Handle increased volume in transactions without increasing costs or headcount
• Reduce administrative overhead
• Improve visibility of inbound cash
• Minimize gross margin impact by optimizing trade terms
• Increase control over inbound cash flow through dynamic trade terms management

Things to Consider

Typical ROI results a manufacturer can expect include:

• 1% or more increase in top line revenue
• 1-2% improvement in gross margin
• 75% decrease in billing and payment costs
• 50% reduction in customer service call volume and costs
• 80% reduction in cost of customer-specific bill formatting
• 100% elimination of lost bills
• 75% decrease in costs of payment reconciliation
• 3-15 day reduction in days sales outstanding (DSO)

AVOLENT works with your existing billing and accounting systems, and can be installed and running in as little as 90 days.