Customer success
How did Babolat go from 70 to 100% of compliant supplier invoices thanks to Winddle?
"The monitoring of our production purchase invoices on Winddle, in direct collaboration with suppliers and our accounting department, is a real plus in our daily operations. In concrete terms, this allows us to save more than half a day per week, and the rate of non-compliant invoices has dropped from 30% to 0%."
Nicolas Maudhuit
Procurement Manager at Babolat
The racket sports leader
Founded in Lyon in 1875, Babolat is one of the best-known racket sports brands in the world and the oldest company dedicated to this activity. It sells over 1.7 million rackets every year and distributes its products to 15,000 retailers and 20,000 sports clubs in over 100 countries.
Such an indirect distribution network requires precise management of physical and informational flows throughout the order to ensure that it is delivered at the right time and in the right quantity. To meet this challenge, Babolat has relied on the Winddle collaborative platform for several years to manage all their supply chain flows in real time, from order validation to delivery.
The initial success of this collaboration has led Babolat to expand its use of Winddle by integrating the Suppliers Invoice module to simplify and ensure the reliability of a supplier invoice reconciliation process that was previously time-consuming and error-prone.
Manual invoice management leading to errors and very long payment delays
Before using Winddle, Babolat's procurement team manually checked the consistency between invoices and packing lists sent by suppliers for each shipment, before submitting their approval to the accounting department for invoice creation and monitoring in the Compta ERP. This process took on average half a day of data entry per week and had an average anomaly rate of 30% for received invoices.
Beyond these operational efficiency issues, this process resulted in payment of supplier invoices only upon receipt of goods to verify the alignment of received quantities with those invoiced. This meant a 45-day delay for a shipment delivered by boat from Asia.
These payment delays and lack of visibility into the invoice processing could lead to dissatisfaction among suppliers.
A streamlined and reliable invoice tracking process with Winddle
The activation of the Suppliers Invoice module now allows Babolat's suppliers to be autonomous in declaring their invoices directly on the platform. The system, which allows for specific constraints to be configured on the timing of invoicing (relative to the incoterm of purchases, for example, the coherence of the amount with the declared packaged quantities, etc.), ensures that Babolat's teams receive compliant invoices and automates the reconciliation with purchase orders.
Once the invoice is validated on Winddle, the accounting system automatically receives pre-invoicing elements.
Results:
Seamless Supplier Collaboration from Order to Payment
Sector: Sports Equipment
The Challenge: Fragmented management (emails/Excel) causing poor visibility into production milestones and a 30% invoice error rate, leading to significant payment delays.
The Transformation: A unified Supplier Collaboration workflow. Suppliers now proactively confirm orders, update production status, and self-declare compliant invoices based on real-time shipment data.
The Impact:
- 100% Invoice Compliance: Zero disputes (error rate dropped from 30% to 0%).
- Half a Day Saved per Week: Procurement teams are no longer bogged down by manual data entry or chasing info.
- Full Flow Visibility: Real-time tracking of 1.7M+ rackets annually from factory floor to warehouse.
