Case study No. 14. Field Marketing Business saves €22,000 in year one

Field Marketing Business based in Dublin

The Client

The business specialises in field marketing solutions to blue chip clients in the Food and Beverages sectors. Headquartered in Dublin with three regional offices, the company employees 40 people directly and a further 1500 plus indirectly. They were using a triplicate book paper-based purchase order system which gave them no search functionality, PO numbers could be given to suppliers before the paper was signed, there was no control on delivery addresses and often the accounts department spent hours at the end of each month try to track down who had ordered and who had authorised purchases.

Areas where the business were losing time and money

1. Reduced margins and Cash flow interruptions due to poor or zero visibility of charge backs
2. No tracking of delivery and goods inwards (With a substantial amount of external projects taking place at any time, detail of purchasing related to projects was getting lost in the company’s paper based system. This in turn led to expenditure not being charged back to the client.
3. Duplicate orders of promotions items were being created as items were ordered by more than one person causing additional unbillable hours to return unnecessary goods
4. Due to the large volume of paper-based transactions taking place it was taking an extended time for the monthly management and annual audit accounts.

Action Taken

PurchaseControl.com was implemented across the organisation, 25 licences individual licences were rolled out and Budgets and Job Codes were set up by the finance department for all projects and departments. Employees were given spending limits and access only to relevant department budgets with some employees only given purchase requisition permission where all their purchase requests had to be forwarded for approval. Warehouse operators were charged with chasing down all orders not delivered within due date. Monthly reviews were conducted for the first 3 months. The finance team were given full access for reporting and reviewing.

Results

1. A net saving of €22,946 in the first 12 months
2. Immediately all expenditure on behalf of clients was captured and charged back
3. It became possible to accurately calculate what the company’s liability was on a monthly basis with accrual reports.
4. When the next annual audit was completed the auditors time on site was reduced by six full billable days as expenditure could be tracked and grouped online rather than trawling through boxes of historical paperwork. (This is verified by Mazars Accountants Auditors www.mazars.com and is quoted on our website with their permission).
5. Supplier deliveries became more accurate, mistakes were corrected quickly.

Savings Calculations