Photo of Miroslava Zsori and Richard Gasseling, adidas.

The Biller Direct solution is a web portal where adidas’ wholesale customers can view their customer accounts and pay their invoices online.

Click-a-bill, finance in your hands

The challenge

Before the roll-out of the CLICK-A-BILL solution several issues existed:

• Inefficiencies in payment processing and in providing credit information to adidas customers.
• No direct debit payment option available in a number of countries.
• adidas wholesale customers did not have a self-service digital tool to access their adidas account within the web portal.
• Order book conversion prevented by late payments and lack of clarity of account status.
• Different use of existing collection processes across the various Western Europe countries.

The adidas team identified a number of objectives before beginning the project:

• Implement one single digital (environment friendly) solution for Western Europe.
• Increase efficiency and harmonisation of payment processing.
• Increase cash flow and provide short-term cash flow forecast.
• Decrease DSO.
• Make direct debit the preferred payment method.

The solution

The CLICK-A-BILL solution is a web portal where adidas wholesale customers can view their customer accounts and pay their invoices online. The CLICK-A-BILL payment functionality uses domestic and SEPA direct debit payment methods to process payments. Customers can view their accounts and authorise payments.

The overall aim is to help adidas’s customers to save time, eliminate hassle and improve overall efficiency when working with the company. With the CLICK-A-BILL portal, the company’s customers get live online access to financial details at adidas. Invoices, credit notes, credit limit, payments and account data – a complete overview at the click of a button.

A number of functionalities are available through the CLICK-A-BILL web portal:

• Open items.
• Payment history.
• Account statements.
• Invoicing.
• Creation of payment advice.
• Bank, address, contact details and credit limit information.

Best practice and innovation

CLICK-A-BILL builds on and fully uses the cash management and payment processes including the SAP Bank Communication Manager (BCM) (adidas payment factory) implemented previously by the treasury teams.

Implementation of CLICK-A-BILL brought harmonisation across countries, for example administering the direct debit process and the use of payment terms.

Richard Gasseling, Senior Manager Credit explains, “CLICK-A-BILL brought credit management into the digital age and provided our wholesale customers a self-service tool to use in their own time and speed including an environmental friendly option in providing digital invoices.”

Gasseling concludes, “In 2017 to date €1.5m cash has been collected through CLICK-A-BILL for Western Europe with a forecast of €10m by year end 2017 and continued growth for future years.”