Customer Story

Hero

Preparing for sustainable growth by automating key back-office processes

Industry
Food & Beverage
Company Size
4,300 employees
Sales Revenue
€1.15b in sales
Solution
Customer Service
  • Orders processed
    in less than 1 minute
  • 20%
    of orders fully automated
  • 30%
    of orders requiring no more than 2 changes
  • Preview option
    in SAP before order creation & approval

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Hero Spain successfully streamlined its order management process before expanding to supplier and promotional invoices. This is an account of the first part of the project.

Hero Spain, based in Alcantarilla, Murcia, is part of Swiss-based Hero Group, currently one of the market leaders in children’s foods, sweets and marmalades.

CHALLENGES: Overcoming process bottlenecks resulting from manual procedures

Hero Spain’s management and administrative teams were looking to digitally transform their back-office processes to help run their company effectively and prepare for sustainable growth. They were eager to adopt a solution that would improve both work performance and employee well-being. The goal was to eliminate reliance on inefficient manual procedures, which were causing process bottlenecks when demand was high.

Deciding to tackle the order management side of things first — before expanding to promotional and supplier invoices at a future point in time — Hero Spain was determined to implement the chosen solution quickly in order to facilitate moving these processes to remote work.

 

OBJECTIVES

- Streamline order management

- Create and share reports & performance metrics

- Dedicate more staff to customer service

- Eliminate low-value manual procedures

- Simplify processes

- Enable remote work to improve worklife balance

We wanted industry-leading technology to boost our efficiency and productivity, and to simplify our business management processes.
Fernando Gómez | Credit and Customer Service Manager, Hero Spain

SOLUTION: Digitally transforming the order process

Hero Spain was familiar with Esker’s ability to automate complex processes such as customer orders and promotional invoices. Following the recommendation of an Esker customer, Hero Spain was confident in its decision to select Esker.

With the goal of speeding up its order process, Hero Spain implemented Esker’s Order Management solution to automate the processing of over 27,000 annual orders. Fast-tracking the implementation process due to difficulties stemming from the pandemic, Esker’s solution was deployed in January 2021.

Two key users were designated, providing support during the implementation phase and thereafter for each of the two sales areas, Spain and International. Esker’s solution identifies the sales area associated with each order, displays a prioritised list view and provides live SAP simulation capabilities when validating orders.

Esker is digitally transforming our customer service, which will result in optimised order management times that are essential to an integrated order-to-cash process.
Fernando Gómez | Credit and Customer Service Manager, Hero Spain

RESULTS: Delivering new levels of speed, efficiency & visibility to the team

Before implementing Esker’s solution, it could take up to 15 minutes for Hero Spain’s customer service team to process one order. Now it takes less than one minute. This time saving was achieved right from the beginning, as 20% of all orders captured in Esker’s solution were able to be validated automatically as they no longer required changes. In addition, of the 30% of orders needing manual adjustments, on average, only one or two changes are now necessary. As well as being able to process orders faster, Hero Spain’s team appreciates the visibility provided by the dashboards, allowing them to monitor how the business is doing in real time.

Having visibility into all order activity for both Spain and Portugal via dashboards is important for us, because it allows us to track the progress of queued orders to be processed or validated, as well as order status in real time.
María del Mar González | Sales Analyst, Hero Spain

Not a customer yet?

Join thousands of companies around the world that use Esker to automate their business processes.

Contact Us

Top