The customer made the observation that there are thousands of businesses out there in the world. Thousands of companies have again thousand and more working relationships. However, all these businesses and relationships cause a lot of paperwork and when a project or service has been delivered, the financial departments take over and begin to write invoices. But not all of the companies pay their bills right away. Some of them tend to forget or simply do not pay for whatever reason. The companies who delivered their projects or services have to start asking and begging for money. They use their basic tools like e-mails, mails and telephones and have to keep up with and comply to deadlines. Otherwise it is not possible for them to claim their money due to legal terms.
Some, who cannot handle all of their debt collections themselves, even pay a lot of money in order to hire a debt collection company that does all the work for them. This is almost the only way, companies are able to finally receive all the money that is due to them. The companies that do not have the money to hire an external company have to wait and wait and sometimes do not see any of their money. They lose money although they worked hard and delivered projects or services.
the customer sees a great chance to step in and to find a solution to this vicious circle for all the companies out there who are waiting for their money. the customer wants to digitalize these processes so that all the paper work can be reduced and so that some of the debt collection processes can be automated. They want to make life easier for the companies by helping them to not forget any deadlines and to have controlled processes.
Business Need: The customer made the observation that there are thousands of businesses out there in the world. Thousands of companies have again thousand and more working relationships. However, all these businesses and relationships cause a lot of paperwork and when a project or service has been delivered, the financial departments take over and begin to write invoices. But not all of the companies pay their bills right away. Some of them tend to forget or simply do not pay for whatever reason. The companies who delivered their projects or services have to start asking and begging for money. They use their basic tools like e-mails, mails and telephones and have to keep up with and comply to deadlines. Otherwise it is not possible for them to claim their money due to legal terms.
Some, who cannot handle all of their debt collections themselves, even pay a lot of money in order to hire a debt collection company that does all the work for them. This is almost the only way, companies are able to finally receive all the money that is due to them. The companies that do not have the money to hire an external company have to wait and wait and sometimes do not see any of their money. They lose money although they worked hard and delivered projects or services.
the customer sees a great chance to step in and to find a solution to this vicious circle for all the companies out there who are waiting for their money. the customer wants to digitalize these processes so that all the paper work can be reduced and so that some of the debt collection processes can be automated. They want to make life easier for the companies by helping them to not forget any deadlines and to have controlled processes.
Solution: In order to meet the requirements of the companies who have to wait for and ask for their money, the customer wanted to digitalize all the processes that are needed for collecting the outstanding money. They wanted to digitalize their business around debt and overdue management. the customer made clear that their target is to provide an online platform in which customers of the customer can start a so-called debt campaign in order to get open claims and outstanding debts. The platform should offer an uncomplicated way to create a new campaign to an existing customer and to manage and monitor the campaign over the time running.
The solution should cover and combine all processes and tasks that are necessary for debt management on one single platform. Customers should be able to create a standard process for the campaign which is configurable by the demander and based on pre-defined templates. Every customer who is not paying his or her bills probably needs a different campaign that is aimed specifically at him or her.
The solution should also include media such as eMail, mail, SMS and telephone. The demander should be able to remind the customer who is not paying via email, mail, SMS and telephone. The demander should have the possibility to decide and to configure which communication channel should be used first and in what specific order. These campaigns should be configurable and also reusable. the customer wants the customer to have as little effort as possible. Additionally, this solution should be affordable for the customer so that he or she does not feel the need to hire an external debt collection company.
the customer already knew exactly how the solution should look like. They also already had a business plan in place. After showing this business plan and a few mock-ups to Mansystems, we directly started working on the solution.
Results: In order to impress the customer and to make the PoC successful, Mansystems looked at the mock-ups and directly implemented everything with the main functions into a Mendix app. Because of the fact that we could work so fast using the Mendix platform, we could impress all involved parties and could beat out all our competitors. By using the rapid development platform Mendix, it was possible for us to move fast, create a PoC in less than 3 days and to calculate the effort in order to offer the customer an official quote. Our competitors lost against us and we gained a new project.
The customer’s competition with other companies who also offer kind of debt collection management tools is rising permanently and very quickly. But the customer has good reputation in debt collection, expertise and knowledge and a network in 130 different countries.
Mansystems supported these outstanding advantages by developing a platform as a one stop shop for debt management. All processes described above combined all together.
The demander is now able to manage all of his customers with outstanding payments in one single tool. He or she has an overview of all of the outstanding payments as well as of all incoming payments. The platform gives the possibility to see the total amount a customer has to pay as well as how much he or she already paid.
Additionally, the campaign requested by the customer is part of the tool as well. The customer is now able to set up a specific reminder plan for every not paying customer. In this plan he or she can decide after how much time an automated mailing or email shall be sent out to the tardy payer. There are also reminders for the customer so that he or she does not forget to call the tardy payer.