Step 4: Packaging

In a space as crowded as breakfast cereal, where the average grocery store may shelve upwards of 100 different products at any given time, packaging plays an integral role in driving brand awareness and customer purchasing.

Few companies know this as well as BoxCo. of Burnaby, an award-winning designer and manufacturer of packaging for food and consumer goods. That’s why CanFoods Limited turned to BoxCo. of Burnaby to act as the exclusive packaging manufacturer for seven of the company’s best-selling cereal lines produced in Calgary. BoxCo. of Burnaby manufactures the packaging at its facility in British Columbia, shipping to Calgary for use.

The manual nature of cash flow forecasting resulted in a significant amount of time and effort being spent by the treasury team on forecasting cash positions at the expense of higher value-added tasks. Additionally, these manual forecasting efforts generally resulted in low accuracy forecasts.

This lack of accurate cash forecasts had a knock-on effect on other processes. For instance, BoxCo. faced heightened liquidity risk as a result of the low accuracy of forecasts, which inhibited the treasury team from managing risk adequately. This led them to rely on processes such as using external borrowing to fund daily liquidity needs or holding excess cash, resulting in both increased expenses, and reduced interest income.

HSBC’s Cash Flow Forecasting (CFF) platform helped BoxCo. streamline forecasting complexities and increase transparency of future cash positions. The CFF platform provided the company with greater automation over forecasting processes by enabling automated data entry methods into forecasting models and templates that are automatically generated by the platform. Cash flow key performance indicators (KPIs) are tracked through a Cash Flow KPI dashboard, and detailed reports provide analytics such as key cash flow drivers, and comparisons between forecasted and actual cash positions through the CFF platform. These helped BoxCo. achieve higher accuracy of forecasting by granting greater visibility on actual versus forecasted future cash positions.