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The Porsche Inter Auto is part of Porsche Holding Salzburg. Porsche Holding Salzburg is the largest automotive trading company in Europe, active in 22 European countries as well as in Colombia, Chile, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Japan. Today, Porsche Holding Salzburg represents the brands of the Volkswagen Group both in wholesale (importer) and retail (dealer) and in the after-sales business (service). In addition, it covers the entire spectrum in the automotive trade with spare parts sales, automotive financial services and its own IT system development.
Porsche Holding Salzburg has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Volkswagen AG since March 2011, contributing its decades of expertise in the automotive business to the Volkswagen Group's global sales operations. As of the end of 2019, the company employs around 31,900 people, who sell more than 763,300 new cars and generate sales of 22.2 billion euros.
Porsche Inter Auto uses various on-premise and cloud-based software solutions to carry out processes in the areas of accounts receivable management, receivables management, dunning and collection control. The software landscape at Porsche Inter Auto is well organized throughout and processes are largely automated. Nevertheless, various media disruptions, manual processes and associated inefficiencies exist in reporting, in the regularity of process execution and in the error-proneness and scalability of the work. Porsche Inter Auto employs more than 20 accounts receivable clerks in the Austrian market alone and coordinates the accounts receivable processes with several hundred employees in customer service, sales, and the finance and accounting department. Porsche Inter Auto's customers are extremely diverse, ranging from corporate groups and large business customers to private individuals / consumers. The processes are tailored accordingly to these customers. Communication takes place in the language of the customers and in the currency of the respective market.
The motivation for optimizing the debtor processes was diverse and strongly influenced by the commitment of the specialist department. The primary goal was to accelerate processes and save resources at the same time. By increasing efficiency, the work pressure in the finance department, which had risen sharply in recent years, was to be reduced and thus a scalable and less error-prone process implemented. The new process should not only be cheaper and faster, but at the same time be easy to use for the employees in the specialist departments and affected employees in sales and customer support and support the daily work with customers.
The company was looking for modern applications for the areas of credit management, accounts receivable management and receivables management. Porsche Inter Auto had the requirement that the business case for introducing the solution would be self-sustaining within 24 months and that other positive effects would be triggered (shortening of DSO, less capital tied up, etc.).
To limit the risk of a lengthy and possibly unsuccessful implementation, Porsche Inter Auto commissioned Bilendo with a proof-of-concept. At the beginning of the POC, all requirements were coordinated with the specialist department and possible solutions were proposed. In this context, Bilendo took over the complete project planning and created the functional concepts and coordinated them with all affected project participants. The goal of the POC was to test the implementation while tying up few resources from the specialist department and, if possible, no IT resources from Porsche Inter Auto. Interim statuses, questions and work results were presented at regular intervals. After 12 months, Bilendo handed over the solution for launch in the production environment and gave the users from the business department final instruction in the use of the platform. During the entire project, there was a fixed contact person who was available for queries and feedback.
"In the last 20 years, I have never worked with an IT service provider who understood our problems so well, whose specialist concepts were of such high quality and whose solution competence was so high. The project was a great pleasure for the entire team."
Michael Bründl, Porsche Inter Auto
Head of Finance and Controlling West Austria
With the implementation of the Bilendo credit management platform, the effects of the automated processes should be noticeable just a few weeks after introduction. The aim is to reduce the number of queries from customers, cut the average time taken to pay invoices and drastically reduce the effort required to consult with colleagues. The employees in the specialist department are already proud to be able to support a beacon project of digitization in the company. In the long term, Porsche Inter Auto's goal is to reduce DSO by up to 20%, to optimize the accounts receivable period, and thus to reduce the capital tied up in the accounts receivable process. Similarly, general credit risks are to be reduced, profitability secured and reporting capabilities to financial management increased. Overall, Porsche Inter Auto is concerned with identifying credit risks and consciously integrating this information into the management of corporate growth.
