Digital transformation in Optima

Effort reduction of the Collection Management team, manual work reduction and focus repositioning on value-added activities: these are the objectives that Optima has expressed to Piteco team, Optima’s partner for several years in operational treasury management. The receipt reconciliation carried out manually by Optima’s Collection Management team dealt with a series of problems: waste of time allocated to manual activities; slowdown in ordinary administration activities performance; high probability of human error and availability of a real-time update on receipts.

In addition to the diversification of collection channels and methods – wire transfers, postal payment slips, credit cards, SDDs – the complexity of Optima’s collection reconciliation process was defined by structured operations related to the reconciliation of collections associated – various Telco and Utility services provided to the customer – to a single invoice.

The challenge? To significantly increase the reconciliation activities automation of more than 1,000 collection transactions daily, reduction of manual activity necessary to match 400 wire transfers records that daily engaged the Collection Management team and burdened the activity of 5 people.

Innovation and high added value service for its customers have always been Optima’s aims, as well as the efficiency of processes, Digital optimization fully exploiting its potential are the fundamentals of the choice that Vincenzo De Biase, Optima’s Credit and Collection Manager, and Felice Cosentino, Optima’s Head of Collections and Payment Channels, took relying on Piteco IDM for the automation of collection reconciliation activities.

To offer a higher quality service to our customers, we aimed to increase the efficiency of the processes: IDM is a successful choice because it allows us to reduce operational effort, preferring a reallocation on treasury activities with greater value such as monitoring and planning. Vincenzo De Biase, Optima Credit and Collection Manager

From the very first phase, the data downloading from the source systems – Piteco EVO Treasury TMS and the SAP ERP – Piteco IDM carries out an Semantic Data Analysis on textual fields of the payment documents, points to recognize the payer, facilitates then the application of Machine Learning algorithms and outcomes the automatic matching proposal of bank receipts with invoices and / or bills of Optima’s integrated services.

The automatic recognition of the customer, operated by IDM, through the search for a unique data key such as the receipt’s ID, allows us to minimize the upload errors and thus increase the correct reconciliation flows management of invoice – service provided by the company. An increasingly competitive market, characterized by continuous changes, which reached the unexpected peak during the lockdown in Italy and in the world, the months of uncertainty when the pandemic raged and SMEs were brought to their knees by the global crisis, requests an even greater attention to the automation. The goal is to evolve all business processes in respect to the needs imposed by the digital age, where execution speed and efficiency play fundamental roles. We focus on the use of technology to radically improve our company’s performance, different way of thinking, new business models and a better use of our resources in order to improve the experience of our employees, customers, suppliers, partners and all the parties involved in our company’s life . Felice Cosentino, Optima’s Head of Collections and Payment Channels

Piteco IDM answers the exclusive needs of each organization and business division thanks to its profound system flexibility that makes available a broad functional coverage and complete alignment with business processes.

Even the semi-automatic reconciliation of the most difficult collections to be managed – refunds and advances received from the customer – IDM has provided Optima with a marker function dedicated to the categorization of collections to be reconciled, making the exceptions management more efficient and user friendly.

IDM platform is seamlessly integrated and dialogues with Piteco Evo: this enables the users to manage Data Matching and Cash Collection processes in an efficient, integrated way and to provide simultaneous and organic responses to the Treasury and Credit division.

In a highly evolved business sector such as Utilities, data integration between various systems must be efficient to centralize and better manage cash flows, especially at a forecast level.