Order at Sandvik with its own mine of information from D&B
With D&B’s assistance, Sandvik’s global credit controller, PeO Duvhammar, ensures that the stock exchange giant’s various units have access to the business information they need and that everything is in order. Europe first.
The special steel heavyweight Sandvik AB stubbornly grows year after year. From the magnificent 1890s office on a hill next to the works in Sandviken, PeO Duvhammar and his colleagues service Sandvik’s very decentralised organisation. “All our units have responsibility for their own results and we do not control their credit risk taking. But using information from D&B, it has become much easier for them to make sound business decisions,” he says.
In 2007, PeO wanted to create order among Sandvik’s 10,000 steel customers in Europe. “Since then we have been integrating the Data Integration Toolkit from D&B with the Credit Management module in our business system, which gives us the comprehensive register we lacked, with complete credit information on all our customers.”
The advantages are that the uniformity of the information from different countries makes it comparable and that the assessment of customers is consistent. “By supplementing the information from D&B with our own information such as payment histories, we have created our own scoring model that minimises capital tied up and credit losses,” he says. Another advantage is scalability. The system can be expanded to an unlimited number of countries. “In the subject of international business information, D&B is without doubt the best in the class. They are sitting on a veritable mine of information,” he says.
Before integration, PeO sent the customer register for Data Rationalisation at D&B. All customers were given a D-U-N-S® Number, correct addresses, etc. “Apart from security of identification, the D-U-N-S® Number also provides information on the group links our customers and suppliers have. This allows us to coordinate our activities better and write more favourable contracts,” explains PeO Duvhammar.