Supply Chain Finance Community’s Post

Transcript

So can you tell us a little bit and outline a little bit? UM, the case itself, we really kicked off with an intention to reengineer our balance sheet and specifically focusing on our pay days payable outstanding. And it also has specific first time ever solution for Sharia compliant financing. Give us a little insight into why you chose this specific solution Primary objective to free up working capital that was really almost being utilized by our supplier payment terms and the the supply chain finance program was a mechanism really to. Um, secure the partnership element of our business with our suppliers because we do view our suppliers as partners. So by offering the supply chain finance solution for them to receive payment early on, they they would alleviate those cash flow mismatches and difficulties and would still lead to us of thieving our objectives of maximizing our working capital. If you would have to list the the learnings. And and successful factors for this for this case in along the process. A program of this scale and of of this volume, especially in a business that's as large as ours cannot be achieved in isolation by just the business itself. And we need to have a lot of support from our trusted partners, most of all the for our partnerships with our suppliers for them to realize and understand the benefits of supply chain finance and. Coordinated efforts and a, uh, a big push from our from internally and externally to get to a, to a common objective. So if you would have to describe the, the role of technology and the role of the platform used and, and developed for this, for this case, what would you, what would you highlight? So to be able to scale that out to every single supplier, technology becomes critically important. So from a Mr. Bryce perspective, it's very important that there's a zero touch approach, the reconciliation of payments before maturity date that has to be fully automated because you cannot roll out a massive supply chain finance program. As is the one that missed the prices as completed unless it's fully automated. So from a technology perspective that includes everything from digital training material and videos that are made available to supplies in multiple different languages. Simple electronic digital onboarding process that allows us to onboard many suppliers in a very short amount of time. These are digital online signature of legal agreements with each and every supplier. So again, zero paperwork involved in any of this. And then of course the trading platform is 100% cloud based. To summarize, as far as the technology is concerned, without a really solid all-encompassing technology solution, you won't get a 90% but penetration rate as Byron mentioned. If you would have to list the main challenges. And the main key SuccessFactors responding to these challenges, just a few. Absolutely. The key success here is the fact that we we on boarded and we had discussions with every single supplier. The great approach that Mister Price followed meant we could talk to suppliers that are on immediate settlement terms currently. So it required a lot of coordination and that was really done successfully. So they were literally hundreds and hundreds of meetings between the procurement people. And all of the different suppliers. And the fact that we wanted to do all of the suppliers meant that we had to be very innovative in terms of the sort of solutions that we offer. And that's why we developed the Sharia compliant solution. So we developed that solution in conjunction with the banks and Mr. Bryce that was really well received and I think it was really sort of ground groundbreaking funding solution as far as that is concerned.