The world’s largest manufacturer
Bridgestone is a key regions subsidiary of Tokyo based Bridgestone Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of tyres and other rubber products. The Corporation and its subsidiaries employ over 140,000 people around the world, operating 178 plants in 25 nations and sell products in more than 150 countries.
The Challenge
Bridgestone UK and Nordics had a problem with trade agreements being processed manually. This involved the creation of hundreds of trans agreements over a 4-6 week period between November and January. This manual process put a huge strain on the Finance team who were manually dealing with queries and manually adjusting invoices or issuing credit notes.
The process was neither auditable or transparent and resulted in a huge number of errors and increased workload on many aspects of the business. As a consequence, the customer experience was very poor.
Due to the manual nature of the solution, there was an inability to react to market changes quickly enough.
The Solution
The e-bate calculation engine, together with a bespoke front end, provided a complete and automated end-to-end platform that worked alongside the existing ERP system (SAP).
e-bate handled everything from the initial creation of the budget, digital creation and issuing of the trade agreement, re-negotiation, workflows and approval – to the final version with a digital acceptance by the customer.
The solution is being utilised in multiple counties across Northern Europe.
The Results
e-bate provided increased visibility with all agreements available for review in a single source, which were digitally accepted by the customer.
All agreements have a full audit trail, with every change recorded.
The automated approval process reduced processing from weeks/days to hours/minutes. With output files to SAP, less manual interventional was required, with improved accuracy. All trade agreements were consistent within an agreed legal framework, leading to best practice. e-bate ensured greater transparency, mitigated risk and provided protection for both the customer and the business.
