Cementing a rock-solid collections capability

For more than 60 years, Oldcastle Precast has provided precast concrete solutions to U.S. companies in the water, communications, transportation, energy, and building structure industries.

But its own collections capability wasn’t built on the same solid foundation. Its AR operations were decentralized. Its processes weren’t standardized across its operating centers. What’s more, they were so painstakingly manual that the team couldn’t even cover 50% of its accounts during each 30-day period. Its legacy ERP system couldn’t prioritize activities to manage one-million-plus annual invoices, leading to dispute resolution cycles that often ran longer than 60 days.

And because of these issues, Oldcastle had no way to evaluate overall AR effectiveness or figure out ways to improve its team’s productivity.

The company needed to cement a stronger, better, faster collections function. It needed to standardize, simplify, and automate.

We used our Cora ARFlow SaaS suite and our Lean Digital^SM process transformation methodology to create a virtual shared services operation for Oldcastle Precast. The powerful blend of digital technologies, design thinking, analytics, and Lean principles made it easy for Oldcastle to meet its strategic goals for its collections function.

Faster cash in hand

Now the firm has a single, standard collections platform, redesigned processes, automated workflows, and dispute escalation cases. That means every team member in Oldcastle’s 50-plus locations in the U.S. and Canada is working from the same playbook.

Direct integration of data from disparate legacy systems and credit bureaus into Cora ARFlow removes toil and time from account reviews and risk assessments.

Automatically generated, rules-based task lists make sure agents focus on the most important projects every day. And automated customer notifications decrease disputes and shorten cycle times.

The bottom-line from all these standardizations and simplifications? Oldcastle can collect cash from its customers much more quickly and easily.

Better agent productivity

With Cora ARFlow’s digital capabilities, Oldcastle can customize reporting without IT intervention, and track transactions and agent performance in real-time. The built-in analytics make it easy for agents to examine and segment the customer portfolio by value, risk, and trends, making them more effective in their collections. Just as importantly, the analytics allows management to effortlessly track agent performance, and easily access the data it needs to recommend ways to increase performance.

With Cora ARFlow, Oldcastle is experiencing rock-solid collections and productivity results. In the first year alone it:

• Increased agent productivity by 147%, without adding headcount
• Achieved 100% account coverage with the existing team
• Reduced DSO by 8%
• Shortened dispute resolution cycle time by 90%
• Streamlined business credit and collections operations across all regions
• Reduced credit and AR dilution risk