Managing the repayment of LBO debt: Sterimed
Florence Sicault, Operational Administrative and Financial Director of the Sterimed group, explains how she manages her group's cash position with Agicap.
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Key takeaways
Agicap is the cash management software used by Sterimed to manage the repayment of its LBO debt (resulting from its buy and build strategy) and to monitor its consolidated multi-site and multi-currency cash position
Sterimed has a turnover of over €250m and is aiming for €500m within 5 years with the acquisition of 10 new companies
Automating the consolidation of bank accounts and cash flow forecasts in Agicap has resulted in significant time and accuracy savings, with maximum adoption of the tool thanks to multilingual training.
" Thanks to Agicap, we were able to be more precise and more efficient in managing our cash flow, as well as abandon our multiple Excel files altogether. "
20
companies make up the group now
60+
bank accounts connected to Agicap in 5 currencies
+250M€
in consolidated sales
Customer’s history
The Sterimed group is a global world leader in the manufacture of medical packaging. One in four medical devices in the world is produced by this French group.
Sterimed's story began in 2016 with the carve-out of the Healthcare division of paper giant Arjowiggins. The deal was backed by Meeschaert Private Equity and Sterimed completed its first LBO.
Since then, the group has enjoyed impressive growth, quadrupling in size in 7 years. It is now present in 120 countries, with over 1,300 employees, more than 20 companies and 12 factories worldwide.
Sterimed has acquired a number of companies, including EEE (Mexico) and Green Sail (China).
This growth was financed by a second LBO, under which the Sagard fund became the owner of Sterimed in 2019 and its debt was refinanced by Société Générale and Capza.
" The advantage of having Agicap for us was also that we had a fairly precise and clear view of the cash flow which we could regularly check to repay the LBO debt. "
Customer’s needs
Ensure the repayment of its LBO debt through the transfer of available cash from subsidiaries in the absence of automatic cash pooling
Have a solution capable of integrating a constantly expanding perimeter via M&A operations and multi-currency cash management
Improve the accuracy of cash flow forecasts for subsidiaries and the group by abandoning the use of Excel files
Maintain autonomous cash management at subsidiary level to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit within the group and give subsidiaries a sense of responsibility
Solution
The first part of Agicap's deployment involved integrating the Sterimed group's 60 or so bank accounts. The bank accounts were first consolidated at the level of each subsidiary to give them real-time monitoring of their cash position and a view of their transactions. This data was then consolidated at group level, on a dashboard enabling Florence Sicault to manage the group's cash position.
This gave the group's finance department a real-time view of each subsidiary's cash position, enabling it to fine-tune cash flows to the holding company for repayment of the LBO debt.
The second part of Agicap's deployment involved the integration of subsidiaries' cash flow forecasts, which were previously produced in Excel. This information is also consolidated in the group view to create the group's cash flow forecast.
" Deployment was made easy through multilingual training, meaning that we had training in Spanish, English or German, which ensured maximum buy-in at all sites. "
As a result, Sterimed's treasurer no longer has to consolidate around twenty Excel cash flow forecast files each week. Sterimed has also improved the accuracy of its forecasts. Previously, the process was laborious and each time the forecast history was overwritten.
“Every week, we would overwrite the previous week's cash flow forecasts, which meant that reliability was fairly low, and we also had no way of measuring our progress in terms of forecasting. Now, with Agicap, we can see whether our forecast was better or worse", explains Florence Sicault.
Automating the analysis of variances between forecasts and actuals has therefore enabled Sterimed to improve its cash flow forecasts.
Today, Agicap is used by 3 people at group level (the treasurer, Florence Sicault and the group CFO), as well as by the subsidiaries' local finance departments. The group finance department logs on to Agicap every day to check transactions and their variance from three-month forecasts.
Conclusion
Agicap is the ideal cash management software for international groups under LBO with a buy and build strategy.
Agicap can be used at both group and subsidiary level to manage cash, particularly in the absence of automatic cash pooling.
Training users in their native language (or English) and automating time-consuming tasks ensures optimal adoption of the Agicap solution.
Know more about us
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