Lafarge Aggregates - Reducing Debtor Days

Introduction
Lafarge Aggregates & Concrete UK is one of the largest producers of construction materials supplying essential raw materials such as concrete, asphalt, rock, sand and gravel. This is used to build houses, hospitals, schools, offices and transport networks along with power and water infrastructure systems. As part of the worldwide Lafarge Group, the company has an enviable reputation for technical excellence, innovation and ability to meet the needs of its customers. The company takes its environmental responsibility very seriously in everything it does from quarry restoration to recycling and alternative transport. With a state-of-the art head office based in Leicestershire, Lafarge Aggregates & Concrete UK employs more than 2,000 people at 200 sites across the country.

The Challenge
The company was already using an outsourced service to scan proof of delivery notes for Aggregates and Ready Mix divisions for online access by the customer services team. However, it wanted to upgrade the level of service provided and have a system that was better suited to their precise requirements. It also wanted to have direct control over who could access the data as the previous supplier applied additional charges every time any changes were made. Lafarge also wanted to eliminate manual sorting and significantly reduce the time it took for the information to be made available online – a process that was taking up to two weeks.

The Solution
Lafarge selected e-docs UK to provide a solution which would deliver major cost savings and would be delivered without the need to subcontract any of the services to a remote third party. Over the next six months, the two companies worked closely in partnership to develop DocWorks a powerful and easy to use online repository that gives users secure, instant access to documents from any location, twenty-four hours a day.
The solution delivered immediate benefits being easier and faster to use for the whole customer services team and enabled Lafarge to extend access to major clients to view proof of delivery notes, invoice and statement data. This dramatically reduced the number of account query calls to the customer services team.
The next phase of the project was to review the way that Lafarge printed and distributed invoices, a time-consuming process using in-house impact printers and continuous stationery. After looking at a number of print and mail solutions, e-docs was asked to provide a more efficient and cost effective alternative with the flexibility to allow the easy adoption of e-billing in the future. Not only was this process seamlessly transferred to e-docs UK without requiring any additional technical work, but Lafarge made significant cost savings by eliminating the need to replace its existing aging fleet of legacy printers.
e-docs UK was able to reformat the data to have a clean and fresh new look without any changes to the way that it was received. This service was subsequently extended and e-docs UK now prints and distributes a wide range of additional material on behalf of Lafarge including quotations, annual price review letters and direct mailshots.

Outsourcing these business processes and implementing customer self-service technologies has delivered improved productivity in Lafarge’s customer services department by eliminating the manual sorting that was previously required. Documents are now sent direct to e-docs UK from different sites and plants across the UK with all information available online within twelve hours, considerably faster than the previous service.
In the first two months of 2008 alone, there were more than 6000 retrieval requests made by customers with online access to the DocWorks system. According to Chris Bates, facilities manager at Lafarge Aggregates & Concrete UK: “e-docs UK is very responsive to all our requests for assistance enabling us to complete urgent projects rapidly, whatever the deadline.”
Automating these business processes has helped Lafarge to create a new shared services centre. It has enabled customer service resources for individual brands to be consolidated in a single location with DocWorks enabling data to be centralised across the Group. Lafarge is also currently evaluating the adoption of e-billing which it expects will eliminate most of the costs associated with stationery, postage, handling and transport.