The client, a financial institution of a major French banking group, is specialized in providing leasing solutions. The client helps in structuring the funding of heavy machines manufacturer’ clients with whom the bank has a specific partnership.
Due to Covid, many clients were granted a moratorium that gave them the right to postpone the payment of their instalments. These postponements led to a rescheduling of all instalments, as well as immediate payments to reflect the adjustment between the old and new schedules. Besides the moratorium due to Covid, other events can lead to changes in the instalment. The rescheduling and computation of the adjustments were performed using an Excel-based solution, and in a later stage automated using SAS. Monthly and weekly reports needed to be produced and sent to the manufacturer.
Avantage Reply has helped the client in setting up a new set of workflows to automate the computation of the adjustment as well as the creation of a dashboard to have a global view of the change in the schedules.
The client wanted to improve its operational process by centralizing the data into an operational system. Before our intervention, all the schedules and computations were performed and saved in Excel. Due to a short deadline and the complexity of the Excel file, the client wanted to find an alternative solution to Excel in order to scale up the reporting production process.
The project was structured in two parts. The first part consisted in optimizing the existing Excel template in order to be able to meet the short deadline. The second part consisted in finding an alternative to excel in order to have a better view of the change in the schedule.
The structuring of leasing contracts is complex as it involves many stakeholders within the client group. The first challenge was to understand how the client operates when it receives a new contract.
The second challenge was time management during the initial phase of the Covid pandemic. Alongside helping the client in the reporting production using their current process, Avantage Reply had to dedicate time to progress with the automation, which in turn helped in meeting the short deadline.
The last challenge was to specify the needs and requirements for the new tool developed and communicate them to the programmer.
Avantage Reply helped the client in two phases.
First Avantage Reply, developed an EXCEL VBA script to automatically feed the excel template with the new data and generate the reporting. The script was then adjusted to include other events than the Covid moratorium. Thanks to this script, the client managed to meet all its tight deadlines.
Additionally, Avantage Reply helped the client in developing a sustainable solution using SAS. Based on the needs of the client and its operating process, Avantage Reply performed a gap analysis to determine all the requirements needed to meet client demands. All the requirements were transferred to a SAS developer. Finally, Avantage Reply performed the population of the data in the tables developed in SAS which resulted in a faster report generation. Ultimately, all data has been centralized making it easier to manage and manipulate.