Starting point

Founded in 1879 as a credit association in Mainz, the intention of Creditreform was to protect its members from “bad credit deals” and thus help them to avoid financial loss. Creditreform has continued to optimize and extend its financial and information services, which makes it a full-service partner for all stages in integrated customer and risk management processes.

In this context, Creditreform initiated the German Debtor Register (DRD). DRD is a data pool for assessing the payment behaviour of companies, with data being supplied anonymously, systematically, and from across the business spectrum. Every month, the participants upload their payment experiences into the pool. In return, they receive free reports on how their customers pay other vendors.

Knowing about the external payment behaviour of your customers helps you to put your customer rating on a more solid foundation. Having an improved customer risk assessment allows you to establish early warning indicators to assess the probability of failure.

The payment experience pool provides reports on the payment behaviour of customers. This information enables you to optimize your customer and collection management.

Find out:

• How your customers pay you compared to other vendors
• How your payment terms compare to the terms granted by other vendors
• Whether your customers’ payment behaviour has deteriorated over time
• What the trend is

In addition to this, all participants in the DRD programme have their active customers automatically and manually identified by Creditreform. Creditreform assigns a Crefo ID (a unique number for identifying a company) to each of these customers and returns this information to the participant.

Requirements of an integrated business information management tool with Creditreform DRD and SAP

Management of the complete payment experience process directly within the SAP system:

• Determination of the customers and items to be exported into the pool
• Exporting data to Creditreform DRD
• Importing payment experience data from Creditreform DRD
• Management of the information retrieved
• History of retrieved information
• Comprehensive reporting tools
• Customer transparency at all organizational levels – all departments, such as sales, dunning department, etc., need to have access to the information at any time in order to optimize processes and avoid risks

Solution: Creditreform DRD for SAP

Creditreform DRD for SAP supports the whole data exchange process and the automatic management of Creditreform information within SAP.

Features of Creditreform DRD for SAP

• Connection to Creditreform, e.g. via FTP
• Selection of customers to be exported directly from within SAP
• Creation of export file
• Import of payment experiences from Creditreform
• Management of information on customers within SAP
• Graphical display of data in SAP
• History of retrieved information
• Supports SAP mail and e-mail
• Integration into the SAP customer master record
• Integration into the SAP credit master data
• Comprehensive reporting tools

Technology

Creditreform DRD is add-in software for SAP

• Own namespace
• Programming language ABAP/4
• No modification of the SAP system
• Implementation via SAP transports
• Multilingual versions
• No additional hardware required
• No third-party software required
• SAP authorization concept
• Easy to implement