Always „in the Know“ About Risks – KOMSA AG Reduces Bad Debts

The KOMSA group has been using SCHUMANN`s CAM Industry & Trade since 2006. Automated customer checks have become routine and the number of defaults on payments has dropped significantly. The company also plans to start using the software to determine customer value and to analyse annual reports.

„D stands for didn‘t pass“, says Bärbel Gründel with a smile. She has been in charge of customer service and rating for the Financial Services department of KOMSA
AG since 2005. At the modern conference room in Hartmannsdorf near Chemnitz the discussion has just turned to the various rating levels of the CAM Industry
& Trade credit management system.

KOMSA AG has already been using CAM Industry & Trade successfully for several years. „A company with a D rating is a company that we do not do business with, even if I do feel sorry for that company, but with a D rating it is practically insolvent“, Gründel explains. „The risk is too high and we would probably end up not getting paid.“

KOMSA AG started thinking about introducing a credit management system in 2005. Until then it had relied on an inventory management system developed within the company. The information reports, gathered via internet or telephone, were all entered manually. Bärbel Gründel remembers: „That was a huge workload, considering that at the time we already had around 10,000 customers, with new ones added every day.“

Toni Zezulka, who had just become the head of finance at KOMSA AG, also remembers this era. He wanted to combine the available internal information (from the inventory management system, accounting and data warehouse) with external information in order to have a solution that could make objective decisions as automatically as possible. „We no longer wanted credit to be granted and credit limits to be set depending on the mood of a single decision maker. We really wanted to change that“, says Zezulka.

SCHUMANN`s CAM Industry & Trade helped make this possible. „One day without CAM Industry & Trade would now be a catastrophe“, says Bärbel Gründel earnestly. CAM Industry & Trade has become the main everyday tool and is fully integrated into all processes. Through an interface to the pre-systems, relevant data such as internal payment records can now be included in the credit check. A rating can then be determined using selected external information and the company‘s own weighting.

„CAM Industry & Trade‘s huge advantage in this process is its flexibility. The rules are not set in stone; they can be modified quickly and easily without any new programming work“, explains Björn Peter, Project Manager at SCHUMANN. Today, customer checks within the KOMSA group take place almost completely automatically and are very quick. The number of defaults has been significantly reduced.

Because the experiences so far have been so positive, KOMSA has more plans involving CAM Industry & Trade and SCHUMANN. The Chairman of aetka, Uwe Bauer says: „In the future I can easily imagine also using CAM Industry & Trade to determine customer value. A greater integration of the Sales Department into the credit management processes is inevitable.“ In this context, KOMSA‘s main objective is to achieve clarity and transparency about the value of its customers to the company. This not only allows sales staff to concentrate on the „good“ customers“, it also helps in the effort to keep those customers and win their long-term loyalty.

A closer integration of credit management and sales promotes transparency and therefore better mutual understanding. „We have already achieved quite a lot in this area and every now and then someone from sales will come up and ask us questions directly, but there is still a lot of room for improvement“, says Bärbel Gründel with a wry smile. Don‘t prevent sales, make sales to the right customers: this is the credit manager‘s credo.

Another project could also be realized soon. KOMSA has been using annual reports as an additional source of information for some time. The process of entering the data by hand and calculating key figures is labour-intensive. „It can easily take up an entire morning“, explains Bärbel Gründel. Since KOMSA already gets interyearly financial reports and balance sheets from the electronic „Bundesanzeiger“ (German Federal Gazette), it would make sense to integrate these into CAM Industry & Trade through a direct interface. This would remove the need for manual data entry and the balance sheets, automatically evaluated, would enter the credit check process directly as a source of information. „We want to evaluate annual reports in a systematic and target-orientated fashion. We see software support as a future development“, says Gründel. SCHUMANN provides the right tools for this. With the aid of the software, financial reports can be included in company evaluations.

One of the features is the ability to integrate data from the German Federal Gazette in an automated and structured fashion. Various key figures are used to generate ratings automatically, saving a lot of time. The many years of cooperation between KOMSA and SCHUMANN have forged a partnership based on trust. aetka Chairman Uwe Bauer summarizes: „Our decision to go with CAM Industry & Trade was absolutely the right one. The software is so flexible that it can be adapted to our growing requirements without problems and can accompany us in our development.“