Success Story:
Vergölst

The Challenge

As the company has grown in recent years, increasing complexity has become a challenge. The background to this is the more than 85,000 active debtors, who are stuck in dunning runs and clarification cases and take up corresponding expenses. In addition to their high number, the large differences among the debtors also account for a large part of this expense. Their management is complex and therefore sometimes becomes a sisyphean task.

Vergölst had already been using a digital credit management system for several years, which the company itself co-founded and actively helped to create.

In order to continue to meet its high quality standards in credit management, Vergölst engaged with potential providers in order to be able to continue systematic software support in credit management at the highest possible level. After all, without it, the work would significantly lose quality and efficiency, and it would no longer be possible to master the increasing complexity in accounts receivable management in the future.

 

Goals

The new software solution was to have all the functions of the system used at the time and also function much more efficiently and thoughtfully. Vergölst finally wanted to modernize and establish the latest technological standard.

Intelligent workflows were to be created to avoid errors, maintain the high quality in credit management and improve it even further. In addition, as many sub-processes as possible were to be automated so that the Vergölst team could manage the large number and diversity of their debtors without getting lost in time-consuming routine tasks.

Last but not least, the user-friendliness and "feel" of the platform played an important role in the selection process, as Vergölst planned to bring about acceptance for the new system internally as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Above all, the solution should meet one expectation: it should help to keep the probability of payment defaults as low as possible through overview, control and optimized credit management processes. In the medium term, the total number of defaults prevented should be greater than the monthly investment in the solution, thus achieving a rapid ROI.

 

Scope & Implementation

For the tender, Vergölst prepared a specification sheet summarizing all the requirements for the new solution, and possible providers were evaluated. The decision was finally made in favor of Bilendo, as the business case presented was convincing.

At the start of implementation, the decision-makers at Vergölst and Bilendo defined clear goals and a binding deadline for onboarding. At this point, Bilendo met about 60% of the expected requirements, for example, additional interfaces were to be implemented that the Bilendo platform was not yet able to map at this point.

In a regular exchange, the remaining must-have requirements were agreed upon together with Vergölst and quickly implemented in Bilendo's development. During the entire implementation, no lengthy deadlines were necessary, nor did complex tickets have to be processed for Vergölst's IT department. Change requests were often implemented within hours.

 

Short-term Successes and Outlook

The onboarding and development of the desired system requirements went very efficiently and, thanks to the close cooperation, Vergölst received exactly the system the company needed - on time for the planned go-live date with the desired solution.

Today, Vergölst's processes can be very well mapped digitally in the Bilendo platform and accelerated through workflow-based automations, which means that Bilendo reduces manual efforts for employees to a minimum. At the same time, errors in work and personnel dependency are avoided. Credit managers can make risk decisions better with system support and thus minimize receivables risks.

Vergölst's credit management team accepted the Bilendo software very quickly, more than that: even during onboarding, the anticipation was so great that employees were impatiently waiting for the new tool. Consequently, there was no need for a cumbersome change process against internal resistance. This is exactly the reason why Bilendo places such a high value on excellent usability.

The implementation of Bilendo is quick because the platform is very self-explanatory and intuitively structured. This was demonstrated anew by the fact that Vergölst employees were able to work completely autonomously with Bilendo within a very short time.

According to Christian Noack, Teamlead Credit Management at Vergölst and one of the project managers, this is precisely one of the great added values of the Bilendo platform: "Employees can intuitively see which tasks and process steps are pending, and the entire credit management area works together in a much more communicative manner."

The relief is clearly noticeable, also in the management of credit limits. With the help of the "Scoring & Risk" function, it is no problem to continue to fully implement the internal credit policy and manage relevant process steps and active credit limit allocation with a limited number of employees. Credit scoring and limit process are a matter of a few clicks for the necessary workflows with Bilendo.

Christian Noack emphasizes how satisfied he is with the acceptance in the team, overall with the pragmatic implementation and the top results for the short period of time. He says he had a good feeling about working with Bilendo right from the start:

"The collaboration with Bilendo is undoubtedly a success story, you can say that. You can see what is possible with a young, dynamic team that thinks pragmatically, implements quickly and proactively introduces suggestions for improvement! There were no complicated IT tickets, no long meetings. Instead, there was a simple, uncomplicated exchange and top results."

Christian Noack

Teamlead Credit Management at Vergölst GmbH

 

In the future, further process optimization can be expected when Vergölst begins to use Bilendo's dispute management feature and continues the development partnership.