Corona good for Advantech’s credit management department

Guido Wurring | Credit Manager | Advantech

With European headquarters based in Eindhoven, Advantech is a multicultural organization with a very diverse international team. It is a dynamic and flexible organization, constantly looking for new ways to embrace big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence to help their business partners and customers.

Encouraging employee development is one of Advantech’s main focuses. According to Guido Wurring, European Financial Controller at Advantech, there are many success stories of employees who have developed themselves and grown within the organization. A good example is an employee who started in the warehouse and grew into a sales team manager. If you are motivated, keep developing yourself and show commitment, the company offers its employees the opportunity to grow.

Development of the credit management department

When you give employees room to grow, it also has a positive impact on the growth of the organization. The fact that revenue has increased from 80 million in 2014 to 225 million in 2019 says it all. Much has also changed in the area of credit management. Advantech has now been a CreditDevice customer for years. In fact, the company partnered with CreditDevice back in 2009, when Guido Wurring started the credit management department at Advantech Europe.

In recent years, the credit management department has grown tremendously. According to Guido, the team’s development has everything to do with CreditDevice’s software. The constant improvement of the software and the development of new functionalities makes it easy for the department to hitch a ride on these innovations and improvements.

• “Of course it remains a team effort and you need good people, but one of the main reasons why the department can constantly develop is because we have good software, which supports these kinds of changes and improvements,” Guido explains.

Creating the perfect balance between credit management and sales

Cooperation between the sales and credit management departments has become more important in many companies. After all, the sales team is in constant contact with customers and often has a lot of inside information, which can be very useful for the credit management department. Even within Advantech, the cooperation between sales and credit management has improved in recent years. However, when Guido came back to work for Advantech in 2019, after leaving the company in 2014, he noticed that the focus was more on strategic issues, rather than solving credit management-related issues.

“The main goal of credit management should always be, first, to prevent risks and damages to the company and, second, to collect money. To get this done, you have to cooperate with other departments without losing sight of these goals. Therefore, for the past 10 months we have focused mainly on risk prevention, collecting outstanding items and resolving complaints. When necessary, we have involved sales in this process. In addition, of course, we still support our sales team, only we do this to a slightly different extent than before. We should certainly not lose sight of the cooperation with sales, but we have to find a good balance in this,” says Guido.

Transparency is the key to success

Creating this balance requires transparency and good cooperation with the sales department, according to Guido. Therefore, the department has developed a communication concept for credit management. The integration of CreditDevice’s software is an essential and very important part of this concept. With this concept in mind, sales can now access the credit management software to view information or to add and/or change crucial information. In this way, sales has better insight into what the credit managers are doing, how their customers are doing and most importantly; see that their colleagues are transparent in their decisions.

“If we are transparent to sales, we create understanding. But of course there is always room for discussion. I have to say that CreditDevice’s software has been a huge help during this transformation. We have increasingly shifted communication between our customers and sales to the credit management software, instead of sending emails through Outlook. Especially when it comes to urgent requests or obtaining important information, I have asked the sales team to always use the software. This means not only that everything is documented, but also that we can schedule things in advance and thus not lose track of anything,” Guido said. “I call CreditDevice’s software, therefore, not for nothing always a Customer Relation Management system (CRM) for credit management.”

The next project is to start using the complaints module within the software, more effectively. By involving other departments in this, complaints will be resolved faster and everything will be documented in the software as well. According to Guido, this is an important next step to become even more transparent within the organization, and therefore gain the acceptance they need.

Corona positive for Advantech’s credit management department

When we asked Guido what effect the corona crisis has had on Advantech’s credit management department, he responded surprisingly positively. The number of clients increased from 7,000 in 2014 to 17,000 in 2019, which is a huge increase and means that the main focus was on growing the business. When the corona crisis hit Europe in March 2020 and sales dropped, the focus changed. Companies had to close their offices, became unable to pay their invoices or requested payment schedules. That meant the number of outstanding invoices, 30 days and older, rose from less than 4 percent before the crisis to 12.8 percent in May 2020. Thanks to CreditDevice’s credit management software, the team’s commitment and good communication with both sales and their customers, they managed to reduce the number from the high peak in May to 2.21 percent in November 2020. This is one of the best results Advantech has achieved in the past 2.5 years, without sacrificing customer business relationships.

Changing mindset

The fact that they were able to reduce the number of outstanding invoices is, of course, a great result, especially during a crisis. But that is not why Guido feels that the corona crisis has had a positive effect on credit management. It has to do with the changed mentality of Advantech’s employees and especially the sales department. People have become more sensitive to credit limits, risk prevention, overdue invoices and what it means when the money doesn’t come in. Guido says, “Everyone understands that sales have gone down not because we have bad products. But because our customers can’t pick up their products or the offices are closed. Because of corona, the mentality within the organization has changed. We have also involved our sales department even more in communicating with our customers. This has led to improved cooperation with the sales team.

Also, during the crisis, the software helped us address critical issues immediately, schedule activities, and if a customer did not pay their invoices, involve the sales department immediately. Using the software, we never lost sight of both our customers, their financial problems and the requirements of our sales team.”

Internal cooperation essential to survive this crisis

Guido concludes that although he sounds “positive” about the effect corona has had on his department, it takes a huge effort from all employees to survive the crisis. “Everyone works together and the employees are 150% involved. The big challenge is to continue to understand how important the role of credit management is. This is something we need to keep focusing on. Because when the corona is over and sales are growing again, together we have to make sure we don’t go back to how it was before the crisis. We have to keep the focus. This is one of our challenges for the coming period,” Guido explained.