Delivering what you’re asked to, even if consistently may not be enough to guarantee your continued employment when that time honoured phrase ‘Cost cuts are necessary’
I refer of course to the role of credit management and indeed its reporting line basing my prognosis on the immense changes I have witnessed over the decades and which are gathering pace. My assertion is that if roles are uniquely those of collection and risk, the tools at our disposal today have become so sophisticated and automated, managing these two areas will require less human intervention and a systems/process orientated individual and not a credit manager. In other words, like old fashioned car production lines, the job will be taken by a machine.
Little is not automated or electronically delivered already, billing, dunning, payment, payment allocation, 3rd party action, risk and credit lines, order release and dispute management. ERP systems, third party software, hosting, managed services and now cloud computing, are placing greater demand on optimised performance and low cost.
Once a business knows its market, its clients and its own strengths, setting an acceptable KPI on collection and risk management is not as difficult as it sounds. Setting automated systems to deliver this will become the norm and a flick of a switch or system/client parameter change will address adverse or varying movement. Similarly, risk can equally be set at pre-determined levels of acceptance and adjusted for warp. This is not ten or twenty years in the future, it is happening now.
So how does one add value to delivery?
Get to know your clients, the nature of their business and the threats they face
Understand totally what your company does and what its expressed intentions are
Get beneath the surface of your company, engage with all departments and monitor your company performance and profitability
Establish client relationships at higher levels and act as a conduit back into your organisation on feedback received from clients
Work with clients to address issues and downturn in their own performance that may affect your credit support
Should your clients require short or medium term support do not discount it out of hand but analyse, review , offer guidance and seek the support of other major suppliers that think the same way
Don’t just use the vast array of data at your disposal on simply risk mitigation and collection performance
Use data to influence sales, marketing warehousing and delivery
Use data to encourage growth and business development where there is credit capacity unused or never offered in the first place
Use data to highlight lost business and profit margin erosion
Use data to highlight and correct errors within your organisation
Above all, use data to show that you are more than simply a cash collector or bad debt mitigator
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