Sysco-Genpact partnership wins the HFS OneOffice Award for Data and Decisions

The Sysco-Genpact story won the Data and Decisions category of the HFS OneOffice™ Awards this year. Instituted by research firm HFS, the award highlights successful transformation projects. Sysco – a global leader in supplying food and non-food products to restaurants, healthcare and educational facilities, and others – in partnership with Genpact, won the award for Genpact's data-led transformation of Sysco's collections, which helped Sysco and its customers stay resilient during tough times.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all industries, but the food services felt it intensely as restaurants struggled to stay afloat. Sysco, a leading distributor and supplier for the industry, suddenly found its sales crashing and past dues mounting. To keep its head above water, it needed to manage its cash flow, past dues, and bad debt optimally. Most importantly, it wanted to help its customers, half of whom are restaurant owners, tide over the crisis.

Sysco collaborated with Genpact to take several steps to help its institutional customers weather the storm, and also innovate for short-term survival and long-term loyalty. The company also realized that withstanding future disruptions demanded greater resilience and a forward-looking approach to collections.

Genpact helped Sysco hone its collections strategy with a predictive model powered by advanced analytics and machine learning to forecast its customers' propensity to pay on time. Armed with that insight, Cora ARFlow, Genpact's order-to-cash automation solution generated dynamic target collections work lists for an informed and empathetic approach to collecting receivables and helping Sysco's customers bring their accounts up to date.

Our partnership enabled Sysco to reduce past-due receivables and bad debts, achieve a high level of accuracy in forecasting payment delays and delinquencies, accelerate new customer onboarding from several days to a few hours, and cut operational costs.