Credit Management Dashboards Deliver Critical Visualizations

Snap-on Credit is a joint venture between Snap-on Tool, a leading manufacturer of hand tools, and Newcourt, a leading provider of specialized financing services. Sophisticated management of credit is critical to the company’s bottom line. To enhance its ability to effectively manage the tool financing it extends to thousands of customers across North America, Snap-on Credit wanted to add dashboards to its two-year-old Business Objects business intelligence/data warehouse implementation.

Snap-on selected Dunn Solutions Group for the dashboard project because the firm successfully designed and delivered the BI implementation, and because of the firm’s exceptional expertise with Business Objects dashboard technologies, including Dashboard Manager and Crystal Xcelsius.

The first dashboard deployed was for Snap-on’s Extended Credit (EC) business area. The EC dashboard was divided into four subject areas: Originations, Loan Information, Daily Delinquency, and Loss & Recovery. And each subject area was further divided into the following sub-areas: Headlines, Inside and Reports.

The approach developed by Dunn Solutions Group was to build a dashboard that looked and flowed like a newspaper. Each main page would have enough information that it would provide an overview, and then would guide the viewer to navigate to a inside pages for a specific area or sub-area.

For Originations, one of the KPIs was the dollar amount of loan originations by state. Using Business Objects’ Map Analytic, each state was shaded a different color of green based on the total dollar amount of originations for that state for the current month.

The Daily Delinquency Subject area used several speedometers and thermometers that measured different quantities and dollar amounts of all delinquent accounts. Another KPI measured the predicted delinquency. This KPI was a simple projection of last month’s 30-day delinquency compared to accounts that were not yet paid but also not delinquent. This helped account managers to preemptively manage potential delinquent accounts.

Looking at the sub-areas, Headlines was intended to present high-level information, while the Inside area was intended to contain the details. The Reports section contained the "back page" – a list of all reports for that subject area. This information also was accessible through dashboard objects connected to WebI reports though hyperlinks. These hyperlinks allowed users to get detailed analysis for the KPIs in which they were interested without having to navigate to the Report page.

As a result of this dashboard project, Snap-on management is able to see areas that need immediate attention, and take action in a timely manner.