Solving invoicing challenges for Culina Group
Exploring new ways to overhaul an outdated finance system
Overview
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Challenge
Culina is a leading UK logistics provider offering dedicated user warehousing and distribution solutions. As a modern and leading organisation they were being slowed down by the legacy technology and systems that controlled their invoicing processes.
They brought WORTH in to explore the following:
Identify challenges of the current invoicing process
Explore opportunities for improving the invoicing system
Assess options and advise on design, process or technical solutions
The approach
Our favoured approach on exploration projects is to send in a multidisciplinary team of UX designers and engineers. Their purpose is to qualify a problem space, pinpoint the areas that require focus, and to ensure that any time spent is used in the most efficient and effective way for our client.
Challenging the brief
After an initial system diagnostics, and through talking to different users in the business, our team quickly realised that trying to build on top of, or repair, the existing system wasn’t the best solution. The system had been custom built on platforms, being phased out of support by the supplier, and written in a language no longer in development itself. To attempt to patch up the existing system would have caused more problems later down the line, and wouldn’t have solved some of the peripheral issues surrounding the invoicing process.
Doing what’s right for the client
We pride ourselves on always doing what’s right for the client, and it quickly became clear that the best work we could do for Culina was to properly explore the problem space, and then help them formulate a business case to replace the system entirely. We therefore worked with Culina to redefine the brief, and qualify the key areas where actions (short and long term) could be applied to improve, or assist in the improvement of the end-to-end invoicing process. These included:
Getting quantitative data on the state of the system to enable effective decision making and assist in business cases for change.
Providing solutions for how data integrity and mismatches could be improved. Including recommendations for removing 28 hours worth of weekly operational time spent on manual interventions.
Investigating how their existing products and tooling could be used more effectively. Providing impartial reviews and recommendations for system replacements, including cost reviews and security analysis.
Results
Viable solutions for reducing operational bottlenecks
Through process review and changing behaviours around how and when data is accessed and used, we estimated we could reduce the weekly time spent on resolving data issues, from 3-4 days to 3-4 hours a week.
Short to long term action plan
Strategic insights into where and how to focus resources in the immediate to long term.
Impartial and trusted advice
WORTH isn’t tied to any service providers which allowed us to give Culina independent and unbiased advice on the best system replacements that would meet their requirements.