20% increase in the productivity of the collection division by using Charisma Collection

Company

Founded in 2002, RCI Leasing Romania IFN SA is a subsidiary of RCI Banque group supporting Renault brand sales worldwide. In late 2008 RCI Banque had subsidiaries in 34 countries. In 2008, RCI Romania financed the leasing and credit purchase of over 34,000 new Dacia, Renault and Nissan cars, having a market share of 31.3% total sales of Renault Group.

 

Although 2009 was marked by a difficult economic context, in the first nine months RCI increased its market share by 25% compared with the previous year, amid an auto leasing market falling by 50%. Meanwhile, RCI Leasing Romania’s portfolio amounts to more than 40 000 clients, while being managed with the help of a solution developed by TotalSoft on Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, namely Collection.

 

RCI Banque (Renault Credit International Banque) is active on the Romanian market through 3 companies: RCI Leasing Romania (financial leasing), RCI Finantare Romania (operational leasing, credits) and RCI Insurance Broker (vehicle and life insurances afferent to leasing contracts signed by RCI).

 

 

Situation

In 2005, RCI Leasing completed the implementation of the enterprise resource management system Charisma Enterprise, consisting of several modules: financial accounting, sales / purchase, leasing etc. The financial accounting module comprised features that were dedicated to monitoring the financial situation of customers, including outstanding bills, but they were relatively simple; the number of payment delays was very low at the time of implementation.

 

The general economic crisis that affected the payment behavior of economic agents in Romania has changed this situation and starting with late 2008 the number of customers not paying on time has increased dramatically throughout the market. Against this background, the company’s management felt the need to enhance the control over the collection of debts and employee efficiency.

 

"By March 2009 the management of outstanding bills was performed by the Collection Division directly in Charisma ERP. The first three months of the year, however, were a period when I felt the need to buffer the acute control of this line of business. We needed a more detailed reporting system of the cases in progress or solved, as well as a structure of customers in the attention of our department, both in terms of accuracy and speed of report processing”, states Stefan Pata, Risk Directorate Responsible. Moreover, with the existing information tools, people could not measure their effectiveness in both quantitative (actual number of calls and cases treated) and especially quality terms (efficiency of collection, divided by type of customers). Based on these considerations, RCI Leasing decided to purchase a dedicated management solution for debt collection.

 

 

Solution

For the acquisition of the solution, there were defined by an internal team, a series of requirements, which were eventually reviewed at the headquarters of the company. After a market analysis, three products that could meet these requirements were identified, namely a French one and two local origin ones. The company finally selected the solution provided by TotalSoft, Charisma Collection, developed on Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. The choice was based on: coverage by product requirements defined by the project team, a simple and easy to use interface and the existence of commercial relations between the two companies.

 

"Already using Charisma for the management of the leasing activity, has determined us to be quite open to TotalSoft's offer. However, we searched companies that develop such an application on other platforms, to know the market and identify the best product. TotalSoft gave us what we asked in terms of business and product, not to mention the fact that the solution was developed on Microsoft platform, which gave it a higher confidence degree. At the time, we were mostly attracted by the interface, not by the technology; that's because Microsoft products are very attractive to users and make deployments much easier”, states Stefan Pata.

 

Based on the specifications defined by the local implementation team and reviewed at the company’s headquarters, Charisma Collection implementation started in mid May and was completed in mid June 2009. Charisma Collection was developed according to the structure of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an add-on to the Charisma ERP solution to manage exclusively the debt collection activity. Thus, the product does not preserve the entire structure of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, giving up primarily to sales and marketing functions. The system was integrated with Charisma Enterprise to provide users with all financial information related to clients (data, contracts, bills overdue, timetable, items of contract, guarantees, etc.).

 

The application is accessible through a portal and is used only by employees of the Collection Department, but the reports are available to other categories of users as well. The information on unpaid invoices are imported from the ERP Leasing module, while at due date there are automatically generated a series of actions. The actions are initiated automatically, but the allocation of clients on customer officers is performed manually by the Collection Manager. The application generates the entire portfolio of activities, which offer managers an overview of the volume of shares to be managed by the entire team.

 

The application, based on predetermined criteria, segments customers by type and runs automatically certain activities, according to a preset business flow. Managers take over these actions, solve and assign them a resolution. The actions are automatically closed after the award of a resolution. To solve a case, the application allows sending SMS, emails, taking phone calls, generating letters etc. The system also allows the attachment of related actions, such as a payment promises. The action is generated at the request of the user and includes both the preview and follow-up to the customer promise. Thus, the user records the payment promise and the system, depending on the record timing, temporarily suspends all collection activities related to that case. Subsequently, at the expiry date, the system automatically checks the payment and notifies the situation. The user has several possible resolutions, depending on the outcome of the customer interaction. If no phone number or mailing address is correct and the client cannot be contacted, the activity moves to another channel for identifying contact data, according to the internal policy of the company. The application automatically sends to customers the information on balance and terms of payment.

 

Managers have reports on accounts in progress, details of the resolutions applied and the degree of compliance with promises of payment, as well as a proper framing of promises of payment by users.”Previously, such analyses were performed in Excel. Obviously, this working method was causing great delays and lack of data accuracy.” States Stefan Pata. The future plans of the company address the possibility to extend the project in order to ensure an automatic sending of letters to customers, in order to avoid document printing and manual sending. Also, integrating Microsoft Sharepoint to ensure document management and collaborative work, as well as extension of the Collection application towards the Call Center module (Management Department) are in sight of the company.

 

 

Results

The project delivered the primary objectives established by RCI Leasing: the improvement of control over operations and staff efficiency. The main advantage is that employees of the Collection department can manage now more and properly the debt collection cases. After the implementation of the application, there was an increase of 20% of the target preset and achieved by each employee, which represented an estimated 20% increase in the productivity of the department.