I worked with Odufa as part of the Credit control team, which was a 2-member team under the office of the Executive Director. Our team oversaw the credit line Total gives to its commercial customers who purchase fuel and diesel. During her tenure, she championed innovative ideas to address some of the challenges we were conventionally facing, applied data analytics to come up with intuitive recommendations, standardized several tasks, ensured effective and transparent communication with our clients.
Prior to her joining the team, blocked orders above the credit limit were released without detailed consideration. She recognized the inherent risk in this subjective approach and took it upon herself to come up with a Standard Operating Procedure to classify orders into different categories, and thus guide sales teams make prudent decisions of whether to unblock. With this strategy, we were able to better manage financial risks.
Debt recovery has been a key operational hassle for the department for several years. Odufa was quick to identify inefficiencies in our AS-IS approach and correspondingly came up with unique way of rating different customers and assigning them an internal Credit score by analyzing data of their financial performance, repayment history and current outstanding debts. This helped us streamline our approach towards debt recovery.
Our department has access to large volumes of data from multiple sources. However, because of lack of adoption to new technologies and software, most of the data remained in silos and we were not able to leverage them. However, when Odufa joined the team, she told me that she attended some sessions on excel modelling and visualization tools and would want to independently take up a project on aggregating the data sets and will try to come up with some insights. While this started as a personal initiative, soon she was able to come up with highly customized and meaningful dashboards and reports, which sliced and diced the information and highlighted key trends and performance indicators. She also leveraged the power of cloud computing and off the shelf market leading visualization tools such as PowerBI to come up with cloud hosted shareable dashboards. Because of this, the sales team had near real time updates on the status of different accounts and could accordingly engage in effective and timely conversations with customers. Her efforts were appreciated by management as the insights from the dashboards helped in reduction of time to receive money from the firm’s clients and thus increased repayment percentages.
Odufa demonstrated comfort while working with 3rd party vendors whose services we sought from time to time. She reached out to private rating agencies and financial research companies to get information of private companies, which our firm was considering for giving credit but did not have publicly available information to assess risk. She analyzed the reports and created summaries that helped management gauge credit worthiness.
To summarize all Odufa’s efforts led to a decrease in our firm’s NPA, increase in disbursals, more control and higher client satisfaction. Thus, she made sustainable impact.