Centralized Treasury and Intelligent Data Matching
Change Management, an approach aimed at variation
Petrone Group is a private, family-run business that has been involved in pharmaceutical, parapharmaceutical and healthcare fields since the 1960s.
With over 30 companies and turnover of 500 million euros, Petrone Group is a global leader in pharmaceutical distribution offering diversified services from pharmaceutical trading to logistics and distribution, from rehabilitation services to retail through pharmacies.
The continuous growth and international structure encouraged the management board to start a process of restructuring, optimization and operation efficiency which involved mainly the Finance department.
“We’ve increasingly felt the need to manage in a centralized and coordinated manner the large number of banking relationships that Group companies are managing and therefore decided to implement a Treasury tool that would allow us to optimize processes and automate operational activities by reducing time and manual intervention”.
Pino Santorio, Group Treasury Manager Petrone Group
Group’s Cash Pooling with Piteco Evolution
The recent acquisitions made by the Holding, diversification of Group’s business and distinctive characteristics of each company have placed Petrone Group’s Finance Department in front of a new condition to make processes and financial workflows efficient and standard, as well as to have full visibility on financial availabilities for each company, a minimum requirement to coordinate Group’s Cash Flow.
The choice and implementation of Piteco Evolution Treasury platform responded perfectly to financial position governance and consolidation requirements set by each company of the Group. Through a technical form of Cash Pooling Piteco Evolution offers a real-time visibility on the Cash flow. The centralized treasury project started by including 6 companies at once and short term rolling on the remaining 20 companies.
Cash Collection processes streamlining
Group’s business diversification, widespread presence on the national and international territory, very high billing and collection volumes have led the Finance department to assess implementation of a Data Matching tool dedicated to collection reconciliation processes automation.
The project of data matching involved, in addition to companies related to Group’s pharmaceutical trading business units, the Brescia-based company Pharmaidea, a pharmaceutical company with a national and international distribution network of over 14,000 pharmacies, distributors, public and private hospitals and Local Health Authorities – and STM Pharma, the Petrone Group company specialized in integrated logistics services for pharmaceutical, parapharmaceutical, veterinary and cosmetic companies.
Cash Collection process automation is built on analysis of the most processed collection types by the Credit department – bank receipts and transfers – and on the definition of reconciliation strategies aimed at objective achievements: the full automation of operations related to collection management and a significant reduction in low value-added manual intervention activities.
“Digitization, Artificial Intelligence, Big data and Cloud computing are new opportunities for the Finance department to generate value for the company. Thus the idea of implementing a global variation project focused on new technologies that had a very strong emphasis on Treasury processes.”
Vittorio Cirucci, Group Chief Financial Officer Petrone Group
Credit & Treasury: the importance of integration
The ambitious reorganization and improvement of Petrone Group’s Finance processes found support and implementation in seamless integration of Data Matching platform and Treasury management software in use.
Piteco Evolution daily imports bank statements of Group companies and sends them to the Data Matching tool together with the items to be collected. After the registry archive import – daily update of over 12,000 customers and 600 suppliers records – the collection transaction gets enriched with customer’s accounting registry code, and searches for it in the archive imported by the company name, VAT number or fiscal code, to then proceed with automatic matching, through an application of reconciliation rules that automatically search and suggest the combination by amount, invoice number, customer code and date, possibly placing them by document date or expiry date.
“The goal for the future is to consolidate a strategic vision based on analysis of present and forecasted financial situation. In a centralized Treasury model, detecting the final and forecasting Cash Flow through a single and shared platform will enable us to better plan financial phenomena forecasts and to have an effective and efficient governance of Group’s dynamics”.