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As head of Viracon's 14-member financial services department, Jerry Drake spends much of his time managing accounts receivable, corporate credit risk, customer relationships and collaborating with sales and operations. As he explains, "We work hard to counsel customers, to appropriately set credit limits and terms, helping them to grow their businesses responsibly."
Setting the Scene
Jerry has been with Viracon, a member of the Architectural Products and Services segment of Apogee Enterprises, for over 20 years. An international leader in high-performance coated glass, Viracon has installed more than 500 million square feet of architectural glass products in more than 100,000 buildings around the world.
Jerry's commitment to innovation and ongoing development helped Viracon find a solution to effectively manage its growth. At the time when Viracon was looking for technology, the construction industry as a whole was experiencing an increase in DSO -- this being a direct measure of the health of any organization's receivables.
Challenges
In order to uncover areas for improvement, Viracon decided to conduct a Six Sigma study, in which they learned how best to improve collections and effectively comply with Sarbanes Oxley regulations. The company hoped that through performingthis study, they would be able to streamline current processes and learn to better collaborate with customers and internal departments.
Accomplishments Using AvantGard
Solution
Viracon chose AvantGard Receivables, as it is a flexible solution that supports growth and offers the depth of functionality that the company needed to overcome the problem areas that had been identified in the Six Sigma Study -- these including high DSO, lack of centralization, disparate systems storing data and manual communication with customers. The solution provides configurable communication templates enabling Viracon to strategically segment customers and apply collection strategies. It also automatically builds daily work queues, helping the collectors to maximize their productivity and touch all necessary customers throughout the day.
Using the solution, Viracon can embed policies to drive workflow and automation. The collection team is now able to focus on their invoices without any issues and the deduction team is able to concentrate on their primary function of resolving the disputes.
Viracon's Experience
With the AvantGard solution, Viracon is now able to automatically identify and assign ownership of disputed transactions, as well as systematically track and escalate unresolved disputes. Furthermore, the solution has helped the company to facilitate collaboration between customers, sales, operations, service and finance to help resolve disputes and thus collect on outstanding invoices faster. "We've found that the credit management solution from AvantGard Receivables, which we went live with in 2003, cuts down on the number of people we need working in credit and collections, and we can take on more marginal accounts because we can monitor those accounts more closely," said Jerry. With collections under control, efforts to further develop its business are already under way at Viracon.
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