D&B Financial Analytics Enables Effective Relationship Management in the Complex Defense and Space Manufacturing Industries
Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA) serves customers in the defense and space manufacturing fields with a broad array of complex systems and services.
The Virginia-based company specializes in delivering products such as radio frequency simulators, custom instrumentation for laboratories and test/training ranges, signal analysis software, embedded training hardware and software, and field engineering and data collection. Their customer base includes organizations involved in cyber defense, intelligence, security, tactical mission planning, wireless applications, range instrumentation, radar development, and force protection.
With such a complex, technology-intensive product mix, EWA must work closely with customers to arrange exact contractual agreements and specifications. It is important for EWA to manage these relationships carefully. A key element for successful relationship management is the ability to source and evaluate current and potential customers with financial stability ratings and to understand the global view of the related businesses.
Jamey Rexrode, EWA’s Vice President of Finance & Accounting, said the business team that manages these customer financial relationships plays a key role in delivering bottom line results.
Managing Potential Risks
“EWA is a corporate entity, and as such the company is comprised of several business units that our team has to monitor, therefore, we have numerous vendors and customers to track and evaluate,” Rexrode explained. “There are seven people on the accounting/finance team. We are tasked with supporting all the business units, so efficiency is needed to make sure each business runs well and fires on all cylinders to keep the team going.”
At EWA, the finance team is involved in managing credit and receivables as well as understanding the level of potential risk across its customer portfolio to help minimize bad debt, reduce days of outstanding sales, and improve cash flow. To maintain and increase its operational efficiency, the company seeks to eliminate most manual decisioning, monitoring, and communications regarding their customers’ account status.
Rexrode said the group relies on D&B Finance Analytics Credit Intelligence to manage customer financial risks, maximize operational efficiency, develop business insight, and improve the customer experience. Rexrode said D&B Finance Analytics provides comprehensive, easy-to-read reports that provide insight to help understand current credit and receivables risk, as well as performance metrics across the organization.
“The data is easily available through the D&B Finance Analytics tool, giving us the information needed to make decisions,” he said. “You can easily pull reports and quickly analyze the data. D&B has created shortcuts that help analyze companies in real time and we can estimate a projection of future performance.”
Quickly and Efficiently Make Credit and Financial Decisions
“I’ve relied on the platform to establish customer credit terms, and the data we access is very, very useful, so much, in fact, that I have never had a collections issue,” he said. “When COVID occurred and created a high level of uncertainty in the world, some of the companies we monitor could have incurred financial health issues but fortunately that did not happen. However, we were prepared to address any issues based on the monitoring we performed through the D&B analytics tool.”
With the ability to access multiple reports and in-depth data though the D&B Finance Analytics tool, the team can more quickly and efficiently make credit and financing decisions.
The programmable, in-depth reporting results in significant time-savings, he said. “The tool frees up time so that I can go in and pull reports and analyze the data,” he said. “So, compared to the days and weeks required previously to manually go through reports, I can do it now in 10–15 minutes.”
Rexrode said he’s also impressed with continued updates made to D&B Finance Analytics. “I’ve always been happy with the platform,” he said, “and I’m very happy with continued improvements and innovation Dun & Bradstreet has made throughout the years.”
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