Greif, Inc.

Greif has hundreds of global bank accounts and dozens of global banks. The industrial packaging products and services company needed an accurate, real-time, consolidated picture of bank balances and a way to quickly and securely initiate and track payments. As a company with core values that include sustainability and continuous business improvements, Greif knew that centralizing treasury operations was a necessity — and wanted to achieve this as efficiently as possible.

• GL process automation
• Holistic visibility into cash and accounts
• Net cost savings and time savings
• Improved business efficiency
• Increased security, reduced risk

Greif is a global leader in industrial packaging products and services and is pursuing its vision: to be the best performing customer service company in the world. The company produces steel, plastic and fibre drums, intermediate bulk containers, reconditioned containers, jerrycans and other small plastics, containerboard, uncoated recycled paperboard, coated recycled paperboard, tubes and cores, and a diverse mix of specialty products. The company also manufactures packaging accessories and provides filling, packaging, and other services for a wide range of industries. In addition, Greif manages timber properties in the southeastern United States. The company is strategically positioned in over 35 countries to serve global as well as regional customers. Additional information is available on the company’s website at www.greif.com.

The only visibility the treasury team had to the company’s global cash was during the month-end close, through GL account bookings in company’s consolidation tool. But with more than 400 bank accounts and over 40 banks spread across more than 35 countries, Greif’s treasury team did not have the capabilities in place to centrally manage the company’s global accounts. The GL team had to manually create journal entries for every cash transaction, based on daily bank statements downloaded from each relevant bank. This was a tedious, error-prone process, and took a significant amount of time that team members could use on projects that would drive more business value.

Cobbling together a solution based on manual access to bank portals and spreadsheets wasn’t an option for Greif. And managing the connections of all its banks to feed the company’s treasury management system with bank statements would also have been an impossible task for Greif’s treasury and IT resources, spanning years of time and countless budget. Converting all the different types of files (payment files, acknowledgement files, etc.) and formats to work with the TMS would have been an even larger, more challenging, and time-intensive task. Therefore, the team looked for global tools to accomplish the job.

Greif opted to implement a TMS but knew that back-end bank connectivity was also vital to success. VP, Treasurer Tony Krabill had used Fides at a previous company, and said it was a natural choice for Greif’s connectivity as he knew he could trust Fides to connect all of the banks seamlessly to Greif’s TMS and ERP.

The first step was connectivity for account reporting. Krabill’s goal was to connect as many of its banks as possible to the new solution, as quickly as possible, once Greif’s TMS implementation was live. Timelines were carefully coordinated, which was made easier by the existing partnership between Fides and the TMS provider.

Greif opted to use the SWIFT network as its channel of choice for transactions and payments. Fides worked to initially connect the company’s banks in North America, and then expanded connectivity to global banks. Once the TMS was initialized and all the bank paperwork was completed, the prior day data appeared in the TMS within days — giving Greif’s treasury team the information it needed for a consolidated view.

Next, payment flows were set up. A timeline that included milestones of assigning internal IT resources, extensive testing, and resource coordination was developed, allowing Greif to easily meet its goals.

Greif now has a comprehensive, connected treasury solution in place with its TMS, ERP and Fides as core components. Fides provides a single pipeline connecting Greif’s TMS to all of the company’s bank accounts and converts file formats as needed. Daily statements are now received in one standardized format, allowing the treasury team to effectively automate the GL process through the TMS within Greif’s ERP system. Treasury gets the centralized cash visibility the company needs, along with the ability to easily initiate and manage payments.

As Krabill worked to implement the treasury solution, he was surprised by the number of US banks that have difficulty with XML formatting. As XML files cannot be combined like older file formats due to current industry limitations, this means Greif has to process numerous separate XML files. But as Fides is well-versed in a wide range of payment and messaging formats and can build any converters needed, this was not an issue for transaction processing.

Fides also provides an additional layer of security and risk management for Greif.

Krabill added, “We virtually never miss a file because Fides catches it and fixes the problem before we even know what happened. And since Fides automatically acts as a sanctions check on outgoing payments, it provides great insurance against any supplier who is missed in our internal sanctions checking process.”

Fides is the world leader in multibank connectivity, payments and transaction communications. A market leader for more than a century, Fides is committed to making financial operations as efficient, transparent and secure as possible for all organizations. More than 4,000 clients rely on Fides for efficient cash and liquidity management, through connectivity to more than 13,000 banks and comprehensive workflow, reporting, conversion, validation and security services. Whether you access via the secure Fides ONEHub or leverage our seamless integration with third-party ERP, TMS and other backend systems, Fides is the only platform you need.