Sounds too good to be true, you say, but of course you’d love to be able to say that. Well, meet one UK CIO who’s been able to make that promise: Ian Crofts, IT director at a small company with big ambitions in a market that you may find a bit infra-dig but which is undoubtedly booming – debt collection.
Or if you (and this company) prefer, ethical collection management; and it must also be pointed out that the majority of its clients are public sector (local council) organisations chasing delinquent council tax and business rate non-payers – which as we learned last week may equal as much as £2.5bn since 1993, according to a BBC FoI story here.
So in a way we should all be grateful that firms like Crofts’, JBW Group, have found truly innovative ways – based on use of Open Source, off the shelf logistical and BI software – to pretty much revolutionise what this industry does.
"When I came into the company two years ago we were using a very standard solution that a lot of firms in this business use," he told CBR. "But as it was designed for the mass market it wasn’t really that adaptable or easily customisable for our needs."
In particular, Crofts couldn’t curb the amount of inefficiency deemed endemic to this business. That’s to say, all the time-wasting trips to check on people who’d long since skipped, or who are as likely to pay as Pete Doherty is to take up running marathons.
"You’re talking about 20 to 25% of visits being useless to us as either they had long gone or just won’t ever pay," he says. Another big issue in the field is paperwork. Despite what you see on Watchdog-style programmes, this is a highly regulated industry and there’s a lot of rules that need to be followed, which if they aren’t (and recorded as having been) equals a lost lead.
The long and the short of it is that Crofts and his small team worked with a supplier called Haulmont Technology to come up with a totally new way of working for his staff – a real-time, GPS-enabled scheduling and workflow system that he says will streamline his business processes and optimise fleet management and case allocation across all the firm’s bailiff operations.
The new system offers automated real time fleet management, dynamic task allocation, routing and scheduling for JBW’s fleet of around 80 bailiffs and several ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) vans.
Plus, communication with bailiffs will be handled by a custom-designed Android app to enable full and accurate exchange of case and visit data between mobile devices and back-office systems, even in areas with poor signal coverage.
The system also features a fully integrated GPS tracking and alert system to improve bailiff management and provides a full audit trail for handling customer queries.
If it all works, basically, Crofts really will be able to deliver a 25% drop in useless leads – people who they could chase and chase but who aren’t worth it – and improve the compliance rate at the same time (hence that 80% figure).
Which will mean he will be a golden boy in the eyes of his MD, the man who set up the firm seven years back, Jamie Waller, who is quoted as saying that the software "will play an important role in [our] plans for aggressive growth over the next few years… We expect to see real benefits in terms of productivity, efficiency and most importantly, customer service."
This is a great story, in other words, about the impact technology can have on an organisation and also suggests that no business can afford to say that "nothing ever changes" – because it does if you try had enough.
You may not like what JBW’s business is, but you have to agree – that’s a massive vote of confidence in the contribution a CIO can make to their firm.
