The challenge:

Amway India Enterprises (AIE) has over 2.8m independent Amway business owners, who transact with the company using various channels including ecommerce, teleordering and 155 physical shops across India. The number of transactions range between 7.2m to ten million annually and the mode of payments are varied in nature – debit cards, credit cards, prepaid cards and cash.

The day-end closure process for shops spread across India with over 400 cashiers was excel-based and manual in nature with no integration to AIE’s POS platform which is AS400 based. Each day around 150 excel documents were being transmitted from shops to a regional office before going on to head office. All of this resulted in numerous pain points including:

• No real time visibility of cash.

• Reconciliation of day-end collections being completed at T+2.

• 100% manual effort.

• Risk of data leakage.

• Large amounts of time spent on reconciliation.

• Limited control on cash deposits.

The solution:

Using in-house IT competency and the latest technology (.net) to integrate with legacy systems, a platform was developed and built to provide a comprehensive treasury solution which covers reconciliation and all standard operating procedures for treasury. The solution has built in knowledge assessment tools, automated journal entries, automated overtime calculation for cashiers and automated attendance system for cashiers. It also posts live collections via a management information system (MIS) to regional treasury, which can be displayed on screens in the office, as well as banking alerts in terms of how much cash needs to be picked up from each location. This eliminates the possibilities of fraud of short deposits by cashiers, alerts to treasury head for shortages and provides an online balance confirmation of cash.

“The benefits of the platform are far reaching and cover operational aspects, financial performance, employee motivation, compliance, risk mitigation and consolidation of treasury operations,” explains Bikash Mukherjee, Manager Treasury.

Best practice and innovation:

The platform has enabled the collections management and reconciliation to be fully automated in one place and brings improved cash visibility for both the regional and head office. Reconciliation time has been reduced from T+2 to one hour from day end (close of shop), including at the month-end which is the busy period. MIS reports also cover cashier productivity (in number of orders taken) and modes of payment.

There are online test capabilities to assess cashier’s knowledge of standard operating procedures of the company and the solution produces a cashier attendance report which can automatically calculate the overtime cost from the platform. The company has experienced benefits in terms of employee motivation and several best in class KPIs as identified below: