Published: June 01, 2014
As one of the largest trade associations in the UK with a long heritage of representing and supporting the logistics industry, the Freight Transport Association prides itself on the quality of the services it offers to members and its ability to represent them at a national and international level. In 2013, FTA took the decision to replace its Bacs payments solution that had been used for a number of years, prompted by withdrawal of support for XP-based solutions. In addition to replacing the functionality provided by its legacy system, FTA has used the opportunity of a new systems implementation to introduce enhanced capabilities which have resulted in more efficient, cost-effective payment and collection processes and a better quality of service to members.
Before initiating the project to optimise payments and collections at FTA, we had used a Bacs solution provided by Albany Software, which was later acquired by Bottomline Technologies. This solution had successfully met our needs for more than 15 years. However, over the past few years, we have gradually moved away from cheque-based collection of subscription fees to Direct Debits (DD). This resulted in an increase in manual processes as DDs were not managed automatically in the Albany Direct Credit payment software. Consequently, with limited resources available, we had moved away from weekly to monthly payment and collection and Direct Debit cycles which risked late supplier payments and cash flow issues resulting from infrequent collections.
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Although we recognised the need to enhance our payments and collections technology to reflect evolving business processes and changing collection methods, we were ultimately prompted to replace our legacy system by Microsoft’s withdrawal of support of the XP operating system. As our Bacs system was XP-based, the business risk of maintaining an unsupported system for a business-critical function was considered too high a threat bearing in mind our responsibilities to suppliers, staff and members. Consequently, we decided to review and replace our existing system.
We had had a long and successful relationship with Albany Software, with excellent customer service and strong personal relationships. When the company was acquired, we continued to receive the same quality of service from Bottomline Technologies, which is well-respected in the UK market, so we had a high level of confidence in the organisation and its solutions. We reviewed Bottomline’s solutions and those offered by competitors but ultimately decided to continue working with Bottomline and implement its C-Series solution. This solution combined the functionality of our previous system but also provided a range of other capabilities, such as Direct Debits from within a single platform.[[[PAGE]]]
We made the decision to implement C-Series in December 2013 – January 2014 and shortly concluded contracts. Bottomline allocated an experienced project manager to our implementation who helped us in our project preparation and planning. Once we had put our project plan in place, we then started our implementation in mid-February 2014. FTA has considerable in-house IT experience, not least as a large proportion of our revenue is derived from commercial activities, so we were able to conduct much of the project preparation and delivery in-house. However, Bottomline was very helpful in helping us to keep the project on track and provided expertise based on previous projects.
A month later, in March 2014, we were able to train our users in the new system which was performed by an excellent training consultant from Bottomline who was also Bacs-trained. This part of the project was very helpful both in engaging and training users but also sharing best practices in payments and collections. We were quickly able to make supplier payments using the new solution and while Direct Debit collections took a little longer, as we had to migrate to electronic mandate submission which was delayed a little by our bank, we were live on both payments and collections by end April 2014.
The migration to C-Series has proved very successful and we now have highly efficient payment and collection processes that are closely integrated with our bank. In addition, it is far easier to manage user security profiles compared with relatively inflexible and manually-intensive setup requirements in the past. It is much quicker and easier to set up Direct Debit collections: for example, the end-to-end process from electronic submission of mandates through to collection is now automated and we now receive prompt alerts or warnings in case of error or omission. This enables us to be highly responsive to members, resolve issues quickly and improve communications with our members, therefore supporting our overall objective to provide a better service.
Looking ahead, we will seek to enhance the use of C-Series’ Direct Debit functionality further; for example, we are not yet using DD payment plans as we had migrated from manual processes. This will streamline and automate our processes even further, reduce the scope for error and again, support our aim to provide the best possible service to members. In addition, there is the prospect of migrating to SEPA Direct Debits in the UK as other countries in Europe have done recently. By implementing C-Series we have ‘future-proofed’ our technology and processes as SEPA and cross-border payment and collection instruments are supported without the need to add to, or upgrade our infrastructure.
Based on our experiences of implementing a new payments and collections solution, we would emphasise the value of the expertise and experience offered by the vendor’s project manager, in our case from Bottomline. Their advice on how long each task is likely to take and issues that should be taken into account that may not be apparent at the start of the project is invaluable. While it is tempting to take short-cuts to implement a solution quickly, it is better to be pragmatic which ultimately results in a better-implemented, lower risk solution, and the vendor can help a great deal in preparing for, planning and delivering the project within planned timescales. A payments and collections project involves the bank as well as the company and technology vendor, so it is important to engage the bank early on and test files carefully to avoid interruption to processes that could have a highly detrimental effect on the business.
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