Honeywell Automation India Limited (HAIL) partnered with Citibank and implemented a new technology, IntraLinks, to manage the trade document submission, processing and payment in India. In doing so, the process of exchanging the physical documents, as required by The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), was converted from a manual process to an electronic mode. The project was scheduled to be completed in four months, but with good project management, the solution was implemented in two months.

IntraLinks is a new and unique system developed by Citibank to address the import payment challenges in India. HAIL was the first organisation in India to test and validate the solution. The name IntraLinks was used due to collaboration with a company called IntraLinks who Citibank and HAIL identified as the technology partner. IntraLinks is a new external web-based service that provides a secure, virtual environment through which HAIL can exchange high-value, high-volume information with Citibank.

The system focuses on bringing automation to a highly manual import payment process that resulted from regulatory requirements in India. Through the strong partnership between HAIL and Citibank, the two organisations were able to launch a unique product offering that has since been introduced to the market at large. As the first company to use and validate the system, HAIL demonstrated its relentless efforts to stay ahead of the curve by introducing innovative solutions in order to achieve process efficiencies.

“The new system has brought many benefits to the company. Resources that were previously dedicated to work on HAIL’s document process are now partially freed up. It has been estimated that approximately four and a half man hours a day are saved with this solution. As a result, these resources can now cover the import document process of three additional entities,” says Milind Dixit, AP Manager for the company.

Other benefits include:

• The process of sharing import documents and document acceptance by the bank was reduced from 14 days to four days. In addition, the new automated process is also more efficient as compared to the previous process which was manual and highly labour intensive. As such, the implementation of this solution has driven process efficiencies for both Honeywell and their banking partner, Citibank.
• All undisputed invoices in 60+ past due ‘buckets’ have been cleared. The current invoices are now scheduled to be paid per due date, thus improving the company’s days payments outstanding (DPO). Invoices are now paid on time and additionally vendors are informed of their invoice payment date well in advance.
• As a result of reduction of lead time from 14 days to four days, HAIL was able to reduce its cash in transit and obtain additional interest income returns from its balances.
• With the implementation of IntraLinks, HAIL has better control and certainty over its vendor payments. This ensured that vendors are paid on a timely basis, further fostering the strong working relationship between Honeywell and its vendors.
• Automating the trade document exchange process eliminated the risk of losing documents and minimised the need for re-work. HAIL was also able to automatically notify its vendors with payment date details, thereby mitigating the risk of possible credit hold.
• Before the implementation of the solution, 429 import documents with payables of INR 72.8m were unpaid due to documentation issues. With the implementation of the solution, unpaid invoices were reduced to two.