Photo of Felix Antoine Marchildon, Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.

Felix Antoine Marchildon

Senior Director, Treasury

Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP) is a leading beverage company in North America. Formed in 2018 with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group, KDP has annual revenues in excess of US$11bn and nearly 27,000 employees.

FX solution enables KDP to do much more with less

The challenge

When a re-organisation reduced headcount by half, the treasury team needed a more modern technology strategy that could quickly introduce process efficiencies, particularly around foreign exchange (FX) workflow. With the leaner team, major concerns included ensuring that all treasury tasks could still be completed on time, and that no required payments would slip through the cracks. However, the team was hampered by its existing excel-based, manual workflow. There were also increasing pain points stemming from their use of a legacy SAP treasury module, which was cumbersome and inefficient. As a result, the team had to implement workarounds and side processes using spreadsheets in parallel, with no standardisation. To complete monthly evaluations of all outstanding deals, the team had to enter all valuations into SAP manually. Troubleshooting issues with the module also placed a significant burden on the IT team. While Keurig Dr Pepper’s (KDP) cash forecasting and management capabilities were acceptable, the treasury team struggled most with FX workflow related tasks.

“We complete hundreds of FX deals across seven countries (and seven currencies) annually, requiring settlements to be handled manually by logging into multiple banking platforms and maintaining dozens of payment templates. This whole process was prone to errors, creating delays and situations where banks wouldn’t receive payments on time, resulting in additional interest charges. Needing to do more with less, our treasury team sought to onboard a treasury and risk management system (TRMS) capable of addressing our current treasury technology limitations and automating our FX workflow,” recalls Felix Antoine Marchildon, Senior Director, Treasury.

The solution

KDP vetted and selected GTreasury. Leveraging the chosen solution, KDP proceeded to implement FX workflow automation across the business in 2021. Creating a feed from its existing Bloomberg FXGO trading platform to GTreasury, and another to provide real-time market data, the company could now utilise automatic valuations for its FX deals. The firm then integrated multiple SAP ERP system instances and global business units, establishing a seamless and comprehensive automated FX workflow. As a result of this TRMS implementation, the team now commands a powerful and highly-scalable solution that has multiplied their FX efficiency, while ensuring accurate management and eliminating potentially costly errors. FX settlement payments are now completed automatically, with no manual intervention. Same on posting journal entries in SAP for month end valuations and deals settlement. KDP has calculated that eliminating the otherwise manual work associated with FX payments saves an estimated 130 work hours per year, while sparing the company from penalty fees and providing peace of mind.

Best practice and innovation

The FX workflow automation achieved by the KDP treasury team’s implementation has transformed the efficiency, accuracy and scale at which this lean team can complete valuable FX transactions. Eliminating errors and unnecessary banking charges have the added effect of increasing the treasury team’s credibility with banking partners, avoiding the reputational damage of missed payments and incurred costs. The TRMS also provides the benefit of greater data visibility across groups within KDP.

Key benefits

• Cost savings.
• Headcount savings.
• Process efficiencies.
• Return on investment.
• Increased automation.
• Risk mitigated.
• Improved visibility.
• Errors reduced.
• Manual intervention reduced.
• Increased system connectivity.
• Future proof solution.

Before implementing this solution, KDP could only complete FX deals on a much smaller scale and didn’t perform hedge accounting or balance sheet hedging. The treasury technology transformation has enabled the company to complete twice the number of trades in 2021 than in 2020 without impacting the team’s workload. This increase in trade volume and complexity wouldn’t have been possible without the TRMS’s automation and efficiency.