A complete overview of our sustainable customer portfolio
Alpro is the European pioneer and market leader in the development of soyfoods and beverages. Over the past 30 years, Alpro has been striving for a healthy, sustainable way to make products that not only taste good, but also retain the unique nutritional value of the soybean. Altares Dun & Bradstreet has been able to help Alpro with portfolio manager to set up a sustainable business strategy from an ad hoc to a continuous basis.
Knowledge of the customer and insight into his situation support our company in maintaining a sustainable customer relationship.”
1. The Challenge
Sustainable credit management
"At Alpro, we strive to build lasting relationships with our customers; they are one of the pillars of our business strategy."
For the credit control team, it is of course first and foremost important to have insight into the financial health of our customers. We used to base this on reports that we requested ad hoc from Altares Dun & Bradstreet. This provided us with valuable information, but not on an ongoing basis. We were looking for a way to monitor the situation on a daily basis, in a structured and efficient way. We therefore decided to use the Portfolio Manager."
2 The solution
Portfolio Manager
This online analysis programme combines and analyses the outstanding customer invoices with the information from the D&B database. The result is a clear overview of developments in the customer portfolio. Thanks to the Portfolio Manager, companies gain insight into the risk distribution within their portfolio and are able to see which customers are high-risk at a glance. The tool also exposes the total risks within the company structure and estimates the commercial risk for the next 12 months: useful for management reporting.
The right activities
Elke Segers: “At Alpro, the Portfolio Manager is used for our reporting several times a year. But the great added value for us lies in the daily use of the tool. It allows us to follow up on our customers in an efficient way and to immediately link action to it. To which customers should reminders be sent sooner, should deliveries be blocked, and where should we not extend payment terms…? These are the concrete questions to which the credit control team receives an answer thanks to the use of the Portfolio Manager. The program even makes recommendations regarding credit limits. In addition, Portfolio Manager monitors changes at the customers and sends us a warning so that we can respond immediately. If necessary, measures can be taken to prevent damage,” says Elke Segers.
3. The result
Made-to-measure 2.0
"Thanks to the clear structure of the dashboard, we permanently have a complete overview of exactly the parameters we need. Altares Dun & Bradstreet also adapted the structure according to the structure of our own database (per internal sales organization, per type of client and per country), which makes it extra handy. The alerts we receive when the situation with a particular client changes, save us time and ensure that important information is not overlooked. In case of outliers, we naturally like to have extra information at our disposal in order to be able to analyze things more thoroughly. In that case we request a complete business information report from Altares Dun & Bradstreet once. We will continue to do so for all our new clients," concludes Elke Segers.
"We have full confidence in our longstanding partnership with Altares Dun & Bradstreet, and once again they have proven that this confidence is deserved."
Training and usage
"When setting up the Portfolio Manager, Altares Dun & Bradstreet provided us with the necessary support to link our customer database to the D&B database, as this did involve some work. As an extra service, we were offered a series of training courses, both open training courses and training courses that were organized at our premises. That was a welcome service. Because even though the Portfolio Manager is a user-friendly tool, those training sessions helped us to get to know the possibilities of the product better so that we could get the most out of it."
