Case Study: Cutting Order-to-Cash Time by 40% with S/4HANA
A 400-person industrial parts manufacturer came to us with an order-to-cash cycle that averaged eleven days, most of it lost to manual credit checks and disconn…
A 400-person industrial parts manufacturer came to us with an order-to-cash cycle that averaged eleven days, most of it lost to manual credit checks and disconnected shipping confirmations.
Leadership had assumed the bottleneck was headcount in the credit and collections team. It wasn't — the team was already understaffed relative to volume, but the process itself was the real constraint.
Where the time actually went
Credit holds were resolved by phone. Shipping confirmations were re-keyed from a warehouse system with no API. Neither step was hard — both were invisible until we mapped the full cycle end to end.
We spent the first two weeks of the engagement just shadowing the credit and logistics teams, timestamping every handoff. That mapping exercise alone surfaced most of the fix before a single line of integration work began.
The fix was integration, not headcount
Automating the credit check against real-time AR data and connecting the warehouse system via S/4HANA's integration suite cut the average cycle to under seven days within one quarter — a 40% improvement with no new hires.
The credit team's role shifted from manually running every check to reviewing only the exceptions the system flagged — roughly 15% of orders instead of 100%. Job satisfaction on that team, measured informally, went up noticeably once the repetitive checks disappeared.
What we'd do differently
In hindsight, we'd have run the warehouse integration pilot two weeks earlier in parallel with the credit-check automation rather than sequentially — the two workstreams didn't actually depend on each other, and running them in parallel would have shaved another two weeks off the total timeline.
Partner
Alex KimResponses
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