Situation
A publicly traded food and beverage packaging manufacturer was facing escalating AR challenges that put cash flow and compliance at risk. Core receivables processes—spanning invoicing, collections, credit reconciliation, and reporting—were outdated, fragmented across multiple systems, and lacked accountability.
Customer relationships began to suffer, internal audits flagged material weaknesses, and the company’s receivables securitization program faced potential disruption. The organization needed urgent support to recover cash, resolve aged credits, and build a sustainable AR function that could prevent further revenue leakage.
Action
To recover cash and build a durable Accounts Receivable function, Keenan Reid engaged.
- Order-to-Cash Redesign: Overhauled the end-to-end order-to-cash process by defining clear ownership, implementing controls, and engineering improvements directly into backend systems to ensure long-term stability and accountability.
- Cash Collections: Led targeted recovery efforts, securing payment on long-outstanding invoices, totaling over $6M
- BI & Transparency: Built a centralized, invoice-level AR dashboard and engaged with sellers as collaborators—improving their visibility of customer issues and trust in managing them.
- AR Automation: Designed and launched a suite tools —including automated dunning (saving ~0.5 FTE), a compliant invoice submission tool to accelerate dispute resolution and reduce revenue loss, and a modern AR dashboard that gave sellers real-time visibility and clear accountability for collections.
- Credit Reconciliation: Identified over $5M in aged credits, launched a clean-up initiative, and led efforts to systematically net these credits against open receivables.
Results
The team relaunched a redesigned order-to-cash process—with clear ownership and embedded controls—stabilized operations and set the foundation for long-term AR performance. As a result, working capital improved by $12M over the prior year.
