More efficient collections for faster time to revenue

Data integrity improvements give RRC’s operations staff data that greatly increases account collectability, including accurate, current contact information. “With our Pervasive system, we don’t load garbage anymore,” Seay stated. RRC builds constraints into a SQL database with error-checking logic in Pervasive maps to proactively ensure data quality, for example verifying that all phone numbers have area codes and that names and addresses are in the right spot. RRC also deployed inline lookups in the loading procedures that populate missing area codes and verify zip codes.

The result: “The operations staff is ecstatic.” Further, Seay and his assistant have freed up 3-4 hours/day of their time formerly spent on data integrity issues.

An end to costly coding

“We saved in what we paid an offshore vendor to write and maintain code, the costs associated with correcting data that was mangled by bad code, and the costs associated with delaying data transfers using Pervasive over custom code,” Seay said. 

Robustness, throughput and responsiveness

Pervasive easily facilitates RRC’s data cleansing and integration of a wide range of data, including DB2, Excel or legacy text files. RRC can now move data easily into its stored procedures within SQL, and then move that data into the company’s DB2 tables on its AS400 platform. As a result, backlogs significantly have been reduced. Pervasive’s RiFL scripting, Schema Designers and mapping open up efficient processes so that no matter what form the client’s data takes, RRC can build error-checking logic, cross populate data and significantly improve data quality.

Time efficiencies

RRC has greatly reduced lead times from its data integration processes, freeing up Seay to reengage with customers to find more ways to bring value to them. “It’s really allowed me to be proactive, where before Pervasive I was too often in a reactive mode,” he confided.

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RRC speeds new customer ramp-ups with Pervasive Data Integrator

Revenue Recovery Corporation (RRC), one of the nation’s largest receivables management firms, competes by providing market-leading customer responsiveness and efficiency in payment collections. Its recent implementation of Pervasive® Data Integrator™ allowed the company to reduce new customer ramp-up time from one month to one day, while freeing up staff to be both more proactive and responsive to customer needs. The bottom line: RRC has honed its competitive edge and can consistently provide better customer service than competitors.

Disparate data, deadlines and ineffective custom code

RRC Director of IT Bill Seay describes the challenges his IBM iSeries team faced in servicing its more than one million active accounts. The company receives data from new clients in many formats, and existing clients often deliver data in different formats from month to month. The account data fuels RRC’s collections services and, hence, the timing and amount of its revenue recoveries.

“We had huge problems with a vast range of client-unique data. Really, we found ourselves at the bottom of the financial hill, with disparate client data of all kinds rolling down to us,” Seay notes. At the same time, RRC depended on outsourced programming resources to tackle data extraction and translation by creating custom code to make the client data compatible with RRC’s DB2 databases. This resulted in extensive time lags. Seay wanted to implement a more predictable, scalable approach to effectively process the volumes of data that averaged, in total, between 16,000-100,000 rows of data daily in up to 20 different formats.

Seay’s team struggled to efficiently and effectively service clients, many of which are relatively small doctors’ offices whose small batch loads required custom code to move data successfully into RRC’s DB2 environment. Each client might require multiple RPG programs to cleanse the data and move it into RRC’s database platform.

The process was a high-maintenance one that negatively affected time and costs. “The economies we needed were just not there,” Seay emphasized. Equally troubling was the inability of the custom code to return errors, leaving RRC with no way to predict how significant the challenge of dirty data would be for each client load. “We would only discover a problem when the custom code ‘bombed’,” said Seay, “which it did about 40% of the time. Only when it bombed would we know whether we needed to scrub the data and/or redo the code.”

Pervasive Data Integrator easily handles multiple data formats, saves time and costs

Needing a software vendor that could meet disparate data requirements, help reduce cost and time and provide superior customer service, RRC called on Pervasive. “I had a favorable impression of Pervasive from my own prior experience with their integration products at a former company,” Seay noted. “I also evaluated other leading companies in our space and identified one that had driven good results—and they used Pervasive.” Seay also investigated a competitive product and the option of modularizing existing custom code, and he concluded Pervasive would yield the best results.

Seay stressed, “It came down to the two most basic reasons: time and money. The secondary costs [those costs other than licensing, e.g. training, skillbuilding, planning and implementation] for Pervasive would be far lower than with either recoding or another product, such as Whitehill or Knowledgesync.” Pervasive Data Integrator also has been highly effective in addressing the bewildering array of raw data RRC moves into its database structure.

Pervasive delivers 40% efficiency gain, 60% cost savings

Improved customer experience, speed to revenue and lower costs are what RRC Director of IT Bill Seay wanted to achieve by employing Pervasive Data Integrator to meet his data migration, cleansing and integration needs. Efficiency gains upwards of 40% and cost savings of 60% have him feeling upbeat, as the company has more time and dollars for other purposes. RRC’s senior management and sales teams are happy with the results too: using Pervasive has led to improved payment collection processes and enhanced client satisfaction and retention.

Pervasive Data Profiler under consideration to actively identify data problems

Pervasive technology offers a lot of options for RRC, and will help the company meet emerging client needs. “Now that I have Pervasive fully running, I am amazed at the many things we can do with it. Besides my raw data needs being met, we envision using Pervasive to help move to a more automated environment where we can deploy Pervasive Data Integrator for file watching and FTP transfers,” Seay forecasts. The director of IT also is assessing ways to use Pervasive Data Profiler to further develop business rules, creating a client file map to actively identify consistent data problem areas such as missing Social Security Numbers or current employment information.