CDW Generates $200M with Automated Credit Decisioning

CDW Corporation is a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of integrated information technology products and services for small, medium and large size businesses, government, education and healthcare customers in the U.S. and Canada. CDW delivers critical solutions for their customers’ increasingly complex IT needs. CDW was founded in 1984 and employs more than 7,200 coworkers. In 2014, the company generated net sales in excess of $12.0 billion.

D&B was a great partner throughout the implementation process. They invested the time required to understand our business needs, and worked closely with our team to develop the right solution based on our risk tolerance, operational goals, and technical capabilities.
Jason Housinger, Director of Credit, CDW Corporation
 

The Challenge

CDW turned to Dun & Bradstreet for help with expediting its credit risk decision making process. With more than 250,000 customers, the company was looking to optimize its quote-to-cash cycle. They wanted a way to grow their business by focusing on:

  • Accelerating the credit decision process on large volumes of sales requests
  • Improving operational efficiencies across their sales and credit departments
  • Maintaining a consistent risk-based approach that aligned with company policy

 

Taking all the company’s business specifications into consideration, the Dun & Bradstreet team proposed an automated decisioning solution. The recommendation included implementing D&B® Decision Maker for DNBi with D&B® Web Services powered by a custom recommended credit limit evaluation model created by the Dun & Bradstreet Analytics team in close collaboration with CDW’s credit management team.

How it Works

Addressing the requirement to make it quicker and easier for sales to submit and get decisions of applications, D&B helped execute an “instant credit” button in the company’s sales CRM system to help accelerate credit decisions.

  • Clicking on the button submits the credit request via D&B Web Services directly to D&B Decision Maker for DNBi
  • The credit request runs through CDW’s custom credit evaluation model created with D&B’s analytics team, and an automated decision, “Approved”, or “Credit Review Required”, is returned within seconds to the sales team in the company’s CRM system
  • Once a decision is returned to the CRM system, D&B Web Services automatically updates CDW’s order management and credit limit maintenance tool
  • Key credit variables and information on the decision are automatically sent and archived in the Notes section of the finance system of record, making it part of the credit file without human intervention

The challenge of improving operational efficiencies was answered with the implementation of Dun & Bradstreet Web Services.

Results and ROI

Prior to adopting D&B Web Services, the Credit Department had to manually re-key the application data, the final business decision and the credit limit assignment into the CRM system. D&B Decision Maker for DNBi with D&B Web Services allows both sales and credit to work in their native systems, ultimately saving time and making both more efficient.

Since going live with their “Instant Credit” button, more than 70,000 customers have been evaluated, with more than $1.4 billion in immediate credit limits approved. In that same timeframe, CDW has generated over $200 million in sales to customers who were approved through the Instant Credit process. How’s that for partnering to enable smart growth?

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