The Challenge
A national distributor of office supplies known for their superior customer service and ability to meet their customers’ office supply inventory needs recognized they had a critical distribution problem – getting invoices in the hands of their customers in a timely manner. Too often, invoice mailing was delayed up to two weeks from the end-of-month billing cycle. The chaotic internal mail process tied up four to six employees for one week, manually sorting through the invoices to determine special mailing needs for each invoice.
The Solution
Statement Solutions was processing and printing the invoices already. The Statement Solutions team proposed a solution to extend their service to efficiently categorize and automate invoice mailing. Leveraging their Asset Lifeline process, the Statement Solutions team determined that grouping mailings into three primary categories would significantly streamline distribution: packages mailed directly to customers, packages mailed to company-owned distribution points, and packages mailed back to headquarters. Analysis showed that 80% of packages could be mailed directly to customers, which meant customers would receive their invoices more quickly and shorten the time of invoicing to payment receipt for the distributor. The solution Statement Solutions implemented provided the means for efficient special handling of invoices when necessary by the internal office supply distributor’s staff.
The office supplies distributor required a better means for their customer service and payment collections personnel to access the latest product distribution and invoice information. Statement Solutions creates .PDFs of all invoices and provides them in a searchable, indexed CD-ROM.