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COPYRIGHT 2004 National Association of Credit Management
No doubt you already know the bad news: increasing regulatory and competitive pressures are testing your mettle as never before. On top of your usual full plate of tasks, mounting compliance mandates loom for tighter internal controls, more consistent and documented policies, even greater accountability for the accuracy of accounts receivable, including actual and forecasted bad debt issues. There's also a greater urgency to deliver faster, more efficient services to customers in order to squeeze more value out of each relationship.
The good news: technological tools are rising to the occasion. Credit managers have seen their job transformed over the past few years by software offering a richer set of information. The current crop provides greater functionality, better analytic capabilities, enhanced ability to transmit critical information where and when it's needed--faster and more accurately than ever before--as well as greater customer self-service features, with these tools, manual intervention virtually disappears, increasing accuracy, efficiency and the amount of time credit personnel have to spend on analysis.
At the core of these capabilities is one central theme: integration. The effort to integrate customer data from a wide variety of sources is driven by two of your most fundamental goals: to improve order-to-cash cycle time and reduce exception rates, according to David Schmidt, Principal of A2 Resources in Yardley, PA. "While in the past, applications like credit analysis, cash collections and dispute management each came in their own separate package, now more and more vendors are bundling those functions together," says Schmidt.
Vendors competing for your business want to bring you a more holistic view of the customer by uniting data from disparate systems. The result: everyone looks at the same information at the same time, reducing discrepancies and redundancies while enhancing collaboration across departments.
"The objective is to break down communication walls so the sales department knows what the credit department is doing with the customer, and the customer can see where they stand as well, with everyone working from the same data," says C.J. Wimley, Senior Vice President of product planning and development at The GETPAID Corporation. "One of the biggest advantages is not having to rely on your IT department or ERP system because these bolt-on applications enable the analysis to be done at the user level."
Taking IT Out of the Equation
The technology is empowering,...
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