The Challenge
Vulcan Materials Company is the nation’s largest producer of construction aggregates—primarily crushed stone, sand and gravel—and a major producer of aggregates-based construction materials, including asphalt and ready-mixed concrete. Their coast-to-coast footprint and strategic distribution network align with and serve the nation’s growth centers.
As a scaling business, Vulcan had multiple order-to-cash legacy processes. With a growing customer base, manually invoicing customers, as well as applying the cash from payments, was no longer sustainable for their teams and a drain on time and resources. Their credit approval process was also highly inefficient, as they manually sent every submitted reference before approving customer credit. This extended the period before customers could actually start doing business with Vulcan.
The Solution
The Vulcan AR team partnered with Billtrust in 2015 to implement their automated invoicing solution that would allow customers to choose how they wished to receive their invoices, such as paper or digital. Later on, they would partner with Billtrust’s eSolutions Team to drive the customer adoption of digital invoicing and move away from paper. They also implemented Billtrust Cash Application around the same time to automate the application of customer payments and remittance information, streamlining the entire process. Then most recently, they implemented Billtrust Credit and its online credit application solution to automate and streamline the process of onboarding new customers. This solution brings the entire application online, gathering the essential bank references and bureau data and ultimately cutting down the time it takes to approve new customer credit.
The Results
As of 2021, 90% of Vulcan’s customers are receiving their invoices digitally. This is a 23% increase from 2020 due the Billtrust eSolutions Team’s targeted customer campaigns. As Billtrust Cash Application evolved — now including machine learning technology to improve matching capabilities — so has Vulcan’s match rates when it comes to applying cash driving match rates up to their original 80% goal. Finally, their credit application process has been completely redefined, as the solution now allows them to review and approve new customer credit in less than a day, and once approved, auto-loads all customer account information to their ERP.
“With Billtrust solutions, our customer service department can actually focus on our customers instead of data entry.”
Teresa Davis
Accounts Receivable Supervisor, Vulcan Materials
