BCW Group plc has a 25-year track record in credit management and debt recovery for some of the UK's largest businesses, delivering industry-leading results through a sophisticated debtor database. Since its inception in 1983, BCW Group has grown to become a major force in the debt recovery industry, providing the full spectrum of debt recovery services to the financial, utilities, retail, telecoms and public sectors, and always with a keen eye on results.

Business Situation

BCW Group's success to date has been based not only on its innovative approach to debt recovery, but its accurate data. In its ongoing mission to deliver continuous improvement in its service provision, BCW Group requires up-to-date and sophisticated knowledge about its performance against a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). Only by monitoring its KPIs accurately and timeously can it make changes where required, either in advance or on the spot. This need for KPI monitoring applies not only to executives and senior managers, but to team leaders and team members throughout the organisation. To achieve this managers need live performance reports, not KPI feedback for the previous day, week or month. By then it may be too late to take effective action.

Technical Situation

Different parts of BCW Group's operations rely on different systems, such as telephone dialers, payment trackers and workflow management systems. These are built on different technologies, have different storage platforms, have been implemented at different times and come from different suppliers, including BCW Group's in-house team. This makes it difficult to identify the data required to calculate KPIs, and especially difficult to bring them together in near real time.

Solution

Arum DataEye^® is a near real time performance dashboard application with a data extraction component embedded within. BCW Group has harnessed DataEye^®'s dashboard design function to build KPI 'views' - views that suit the way in which BCW Group's executives, team leaders and collectors require to explore the KPIs. Arum has worked closely with BCW Group to identify the many data points required to calculate and populate the KPIs. It has then implemented data harvesting modules that gather the data from these sources and massage them into the KPI views.

The DataEye^® dashboard runs on a web browser and, because it is a rich internet application, it allows BCW Group staff to experience sophisticated functionality wherever they can connect to the internet. For example, alerts triggered by KPI movements can be pushed to staff via email or SMS.

DataEye^® has a full administrative interface, which is also a rich internet application, and this lets BCW Group set up its own KPIs and visual elements, maintain the permitted users and team structure, allocate roles to users, set up alert channels and define the conditions under which alerts are to be sent.

Benefits

With DataEye^®, BCW Group's managers have full rapid control over the visual presentation of KPIs. This means front line staff are very quickly able to compare their own performance with their workmates and against their own targets, while team leaders can see how individuals and teams are performing. This enables early identification of areas where resources are needed and to decide where extra training may be required whilst assimilating increasingly intelligent profiles of a client's ongoing portfolio.

Managers get an overview of company performance as it happens, rather than reading after-the-fact reports of what happened yesterday, or historically. By the time they read these reports it is often too late to implement the best remedies. With DataEye^®, BCW Group can immediately monitor the success of campaigns and initiatives and can identify which parts of the business or communication channels are affecting the overall company or department behaviour. All of these benefits contribute to a more effective and efficient operation.

BCW's Chief Executive, Bryan Mouat, says that DataEye^® "Provides me with a dynamic and detailed knowledge of the operation. It is powerful, galvanising and important to the strategy of our business going forward."

Products and services used to support DataEye^®

DataEye^® is built on top of Solstice, another Arum product, and therefore embodies its principles of modularity, component based engineering and service orientation. Solstice is a framework that allows applications written with Adobe Flex - a rich internet application framework - to be delivered on OSGi, a universal middleware that provides a service-oriented, component-based environment for developers and offers standardised ways to manage the software lifecycle. In short, applications built on Solstice run on any server that supports Java and are very easily enhanced or modified without interrupting service. Solstice uses:

Equinox and Felix, which are implementations of the OSGi framework.
Eclipse Equinox Servlet Bridge, an Equinox extension for the Eclipse interactive development environment.
db4o, an object database engine.
AMF for OSGi, an Arum-built remoting and web messaging service.

As BCW Group had previously invested in SAN architecture it is not required to implement or purchase any additional services or systems.