Christeyns, a leader in hospital hygiene chemicals, trusts Sidetrade to secure their cashflow and support their Finance teams

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Christeyns, a major player in the global chemical market, has had to transform their production to meet exponential demand for hygiene products in the healthcare sector. To avert collateral effects of the COVID-19 crisis, Christeyns secures their cashflow with Artificial Intelligence by Sidetrade.

Christeyns is a Belgian group, known across the world for making innovative hygiene, laundry and disinfection products for the healthcare, agrifood and cosmetics industries, as well as for public services. Christeyns does business in 30 countries in Europe and South America. In France, which accounts for 20% of their revenue, the group has a major production center. They are known for flexible and custom services. They pivoted quickly early on in the COVID crisis, increasing their production of hydroalcoholic gel tenfold to meet emergency needs.

The strength of the French market is expected to partially offset the slowdown in the group’s other business. Anticipating developments due to the pandemic, and looking ahead to the post-crisis period, the health protection specialist uses Sidetrade’s exclusive Artificial Intelligence technology to secure cashflow and revenue generation.

Putting technology to work for people

Faced with a huge surge in payment collection processing -over 33,000 invoices a year, and 500 dunning letters a month- Christeyns turned to AI to accelerate cashflow and automate cash generation. With such a staggering volume, no company can make meaningful receivables forecasts on spreadsheets anymore. Needless to say, “getting the cash in” has become even more critical in the present crisis.

“To secure collection, and cut down on payment disputes, we decided to automate our collection process. In the present day and age, managing relations with 5,000 customer accounts manually is no longer conceivable.” -Peter de Grove, CEO of Christeyns.

Using the Sidetrade solution, Christeyns aims to cut DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) down to 62 days within two years.

“After a market analysis, we opted for Aimie, Sidetrade’s comprehensive order-to-cash AI solution. Aimie allows us not only to accelerate cash generation, but also to anticipate customer payment behavior. Aimie augments human capacity by de-automating our people’s work. Spreadsheets have been relegated to the past.” -Peter de Grove.