How Konica Minolta India increased credit controllers’ coverage by 33% using Chargebee Receivables

Konica Minolta Inc. is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, and a leader in the manufacturing and sale of production print equipment, healthcare systems, and electronic materials, to name a few. Today, its global workforce of 40,000+ employees serves its customers in over 150 countries.

Konica Minolta India, its Indian subsidiary, offers a range of intelligent solutions that help businesses be more data-driven and unleash their full potential through digital transformation.

The Challenge

Konica Minolta had many variables in its collection equation — multiple product lines, business units, and customer profiles. Since their core offering included direct equipment sales (outright purchases) and equipment leasing (subscription model), the nuances of collections differed substantially.

Despite their credit collection team following due diligence with every outstanding payment, some of the challenges continued to be glass ceilings.

• The ERP workflows in SAP and the collections process were not aligned, demanding a lot of manual efforts and interventions causing delayed collection.

• The collection targets and updates recorded in spreadsheets lacked real-time accuracy, creating issues in team performance measurement.

• The existing processes and tech stack didn’t allow Accounts Receivable (AR) automation. The manual follow-ups and back-and-forth sending of account statements led to a subpar customer experience.

• Most critically, the scattered information and siloed processes didn’t allow the consolidation of crucial AR data across the different business units. This impacted the agility and effectiveness of decision-makers and CXOs.

• Over and above these challenges, the Konica Minolta India management team had steep growth targets. The existing teams needed to scale their efficiency and effectiveness to support their business expansion.

The Executive General Manager at Konica Minolta India, Nitin Gupta, wanted to streamline the end-to-end collection process with a robust tool to handle their unique use cases and offer better visibility to all stakeholders. After thorough research and a rigorous evaluation process, Nitin’s team decided to go with Chargebee Receivables (previously Numberz) as it checked all the boxes.

The Solution

Chargebee Receivables became their go-to AR CRM within a few months of implementation. The team saw a massive uptick in overall productivity and leveraged better ways to collect payments on time.

• The integration between Chargebee Receivables and SAP enabled the seamless data flow, ensuring better visibility via dashboards and reports for various stakeholders.

• The Workflow Automation helped reduce the manual efforts across all collections activities. The team's productivity increased by over 50%, enabling them to focus on more critical business tasks.

• A strong customer relationship is a crucial foundation of Konica Minolta’s values. With Chargebee Receivables being the single source of truth for all collections, the credit controllers had access to contextual details before any customer interaction, making payment follow-ups more straightforward.

• Targeted reminders using the Reminder engine helped address the common reasons for delays.

• The AR platform also ensured that the teams continued to be effective despite remote work.

Once these moving parts came together into a well-oiled collection engine, Nitin’s team had better predictability in AR and complete visibility over the collection status of equipment at a region, city, and branch level. Advanced Analytics allowed them to be better prepared for the market challenges, including those imposed by the pandemic.