CASE STUDY

National Accounting & Consulting Firm Relies on DNBi for Customer Clarity BDO cuts through its data overload to reveal actionable insight on clients BDO USA provides accounting and consulting services via 49 domestic offices. Its offerings include assurance, tax, financial advisory and consulting services to a wide range of publicly traded and privately held companies.

Challenge: Controlling data overload While having seemingly limitless data might be a good problem to have, data without actionable insight is not. That’s the situation in which BDO found itself in the mid-2000s, when it reexamined how to rein-in the overwhelming amount of data at its disposal.

“We had so much information, but we didn’t know what to do with all of it,” says Laurence Goldberg, BDO’s National Director of Receivables Management. “We serve clients across the spectrum of industries in the United States, from small private companies to billion-dollar public and private organizations. We needed to develop a methodology to consistently use the data to identify credit insight regardless of business size and type.”

The main challenge for BDO lay in addressing data overload, establishing a new methodology around how that data was used, and achieving internal acceptance of the methodology. Goldberg started from scratch, assessing what BDO was already doing – and not doing – with its data.

“I challenged D&B to prove their value to me,” Goldberg says. “We were spending a significant amount of money. I said, ‘You could provide all this data, but if it’s not actionable data, it’s useless.’”

Solution: DNBi gives BDO leading-edge insight The introduction of DNBi in 2004 proved the solution Goldberg and BDO were seeking, and the company became an early adopter. For the first time, the company could evaluate how it used its data and how to make it actionable. The switch to DNBi instantly set BDO apart from its industry peers.

D&B worked with BDO to develop a methodology and modeling plan for evaluating credit insight relative to BDO’s business needs. A consistent approach to credit insight was paramount; Goldberg and his team effectively incorporated the system into BDO’s overall client acceptance approach. With support from D&B, BDO built a new statistical model that combines DNBi’s scores, including PAYDEX and the Financial Stress Score. The model is now used for welcoming new commercial clients.

August 2013

“We had so much information, but we didn’t know what to do with all of it.”

- Laurence Goldberg, BDO’s National Director of Receivables Management

“I’m looking for objective data that can be provided to our offices across the country when they are onboarding new clients,” Goldberg says.

DNBi offers a suite of solutions to address a number of BDO’s business needs. For instance, the company uses Decision Maker when examining potential clients, and uses Account Manager and Portfolio Risk Manager when examining existing clients and the overall “health” of BDO’s client portfolio.

Goldberg creates a D&B Scorecard that can plug into the company’s PeopleSoft application. The D&B score reflects the external universe, says Goldberg; that is, the score represents D&B’s assessment of a client based on its credit experience with other companies. Conversely, BDO develops its own credit score, which represents a client’s credit experience with BDO. Then BDO examines the delta between both scores.

ROI: Creating customized scorecards, developing relationships BDO continues to work with D&B to derive actionable insight from D&B products and services.

“For us it’s the ability to create customized scorecards that are unique to our business model,” says Goldberg. “We’ve refined it over the years, but I’ve had the benefit of some very talented support folks from D&B.”

Through the relationship with D&B, BDO continually assures a consistent and comprehensive approach to its credit insight management processes utilizing the DNBi solution. D&B support staff further add value to DNBi by helping Goldberg’s team better understand and use the product to optimize BDO’s credit insight management performance.

August 2013

About Dun & Bradstreet® (D&B)Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE:DNB) is the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies to Decide with Confidence® for 171 years. D&B’s global commercial database contains more than 220 million business records. The database is enhanced by D&B’s proprietary DUNSRight® Quality Process, which provides our customers with quality business information. This quality information is the foundation of our global solutions that customers rely on to make critical business decisions.

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© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2013. All rights reserved. (DB-3556 8/13)