
Two lines of business: Service Marine Parts & Accessories (Land ‘N’ Sea), and Engines.
Land ‘N’ Sea distributes marine parts and accessories to over 18,000 global customers through the US, Canada, and Latin America with 1,800 customers added yearly. Their Credit Management was driven primarily by spreadsheets and emails.
Mercury Marine has operations in US, Canada, and Latin America. In addition to working in multiple regions, they had four disparate ERPs for storing customer details: Land ‘N’ Sea, Attwood, Garelick, and Mercury Marine. These business units had common customers. The existing systems were antiquated, inefficient, and incapable of interface. Between these businesses, they had an inconsistent credit approach which led to increased complexity.
Data had to be manually pulled from different credit agencies, including Experian and Equifax. Public financials or credit insurance companies like Yahoo Finance were not considered.
The entire process relied on spreadsheets, faxes, and email chasing.
Data had to be entered twice, once on a spreadsheet and then again on the ERP.
Since different business units had different ERPs and some of these units had common customers, this led to dealing with multiple ERPs for retrieving and updating customer data.
Mercury Machine had multiple business units, and it was likely that there were common customers across businesses. If a customer worked with Garelick, Mercury Marine, and Attwood, then to manage the credit risk, the credit analysts needed to manually look at the customer information present in four different ERPs.
The credit teams were needed a strategy that helped them connect information across multiple ERP systems to provide unprecedented visibility, so that credit risk is reduced and the credit risk monitoring process is improved.
Mercury Marine is an industry-leading developer and manufacturer of a broad range of marine propulsion systems for recreational and commercial applications acquired by Brunswick Corporation in 1961.
Marine Engine Manufacturer
North America
$719.7 million
Credit Cloud
The main reason behind automating credit was to focus our effort where it mattered most.
Paul Watters
Director Worldwide Credit & Treasury
Mercury Marine
The shift of inputting data from paper to online, helped the eliminate the outdated paper –based system.
The solution eliminates the need for credit analysts to manually collect information from different credit agencies. The solution is integrated with multiple credit agencies, such as Experian and Equifax, for the seamless capture of agency reports automatically to eliminate manual and repetitive work.
The credit analysts get their own individual worklists in the solution. The worklist gets populated with the new customer applications in real-time for review.
During the review process, the solution pulls data from credit agencies and which helps them analyze payment trends and calculate an updated credit score to set a credit limit.
The solution prioritizes accounts by identifying the accounts with large amounts outstanding. This reduces credit risk by focusing on the high-risk accounts.