Wednesday 21st May, 2014

You’ve probably never heard of Palmer & Harvey, at least – you probably think you haven’t. Faced with their logo though, undoubtedly you’d recognise it – because Palmer & Harvey is one of those ubiquitous sights, like Eddie Stobbart, on our roads, on our travels and in and around towns.  The UK’s largest delivered wholesaler, the company is the country’s 6^th largest and delivers to 90,000 retail outlets. With 14 large depots and more than 4,000 employees – it’s fair to say that the company processes a rather large number of invoices. In fact, back in 2011 that number was 150,000, with 800 suppliers and a £3bn spend.

But as Financial Controller, Steve Laws explained at last week’s ITESOFT user conference by Tower Bridge in London, despite the quantity going through the system, it was a heavily manual process where the lack of clarity was more like a game of “spot the invoice!” In fact the situation was so dire that the average end-to-end processing time was 3 weeks. And of course, as Laws went on to explain, this led to a number of supplier disputes. And on top of that, the lack of visibility concealed errors within the system, coupled with overpayments which ran through unchecked and unnoticed.

So the company embarked on a big centralisation and process improvement programme as a matter of urgency – no small task when dealing with legacy systems built 30 years ago! In fact Laws said ; “it was like trying to ask people to read Sanskrit!” They considered a number of different solutions but ultimately settled on ITESOFT for several reasons, one of which being their experience in dealing with legacy solutions – not just SAP or Oracle.

But as always with solution implementation – the devil is in the detail and Palmer and Harvey soon realised that they’d set some of the tolerance levels to be too rigid and the different accounts needed customisation. As ever, more time spent at the start of the process, less time picking through the fallout at the end.

And then, with new customer wins such as CostCutter, One-Stop and Coke, Palmer and Harvey’s 13 depots became 14, 150,000 invoices became 330,000 and 800 suppliers became 1,200. Law said that without a solution in place to cope, they never could have done it. And yet, the company were able to address headline costs by reducing the number of FTEs, while also ncreasing volumes. Not only that, the auto-match rate went up to 75% - something they could have only dreamed about previously.

Steve Laws doesn’t want the company to stop there though, the next step he said was to take a closer look at some of the reporting metrics the system can generate. As he pointed out, the game has changed, and technology has enabled finance and procurement teams to have a deep visibility over the whole process – end to end. The result of that is the ability to create better and more informed business decisions and outcomes.