Project blackhole: Updating customer records in SAP

• Main Author: Laurente, Danielle Marie Padini
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2019
• Subjects: Accounting—Data processing; Accounts receivable; Customer relations; Business
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/7060
• Institution: De La Salle University

Our company is a large manufacturer of tires for vehicles with headquarters in the U.S. and with a back-support office or shared services in the Philippines. This action research, “Project Blackhole”, addressed our problem of inaccurate assignment of customer payments in our automated accounts system. We needed to update the bank information (micros) of the customer accounts in SAP. This improvement in the current ways of assigning account receivables aimed to minimize, if not eliminate all unidentified customer payments that we, the Cash Application Team, receive daily. The end state is to update these customers’ accounts by adding the micros numbers into their information. This involved our customers who pay in check, after which the payment will interface directly to the customer’s account in SAP. To update our customer payments, I, together with my action research collaborators, gathered all customer accounts which initially appear as unidentified payments in the system. Guided by the DMAIC framework, our team came up with a timeline and success metrics to gauge if we have created improvement through updating of customer accounts. After the 1st cycle of this action research, we were able to determine a time savings of 52 minutes per month on handling unidentified payments and a reduction of payments that needed to be assigned manually. However, not all customer accounts were updated - 35 out of the 209 were not updated. In the 2nd cycle of this action research, the Accounts Receivable Analyst, Accounts Receivable Team Manager and I resorted to updating the accounts manually but injecting proactive measures by seeking the help of our Onshore team. As a result of our collaboration, we were able to assign all remaining unidentified customer payments by Service Level Agreement Day 1.