Intrum
Enabling transparency and effortless sustainability work
with Vanessa Söderberg, Sustainability Director
Industry
Financial Services
Company
Intrum is a market-leading credit management services company that helps its clients get paid for the goods and services they sell and helps individuals get out of debt. It has offices in 25 countries.
Country
Sweden
Visit customer
15
billion sek, in Revenue
100
Users on Worldfavor
25
countries
About
Who is Intrum?
Intrum is a market-leading credit management services company that helps its clients get paid for the goods and services they sell and help individuals get out of debt. Intrum has offices in 25 countries, supports 80,000 companies, and is in contact with 250,000 people in debt every day.
Sustainability scope
Intrum's sustainability scope
Vanessa Söderberg, Sustainability Director at Intrum, first heard of Worldfavor at a seminar when she chatted with a participant about data collection and Worldfavor was mentioned. Not long after that, she met us in person, and in early 2019, Intrum implemented Worldfavor to manage sustainability data.
In total, Intrum has approximately 100 active users on Worldfavor’s Sustainability Management Solution. This number is broken down into appointed employees for each country unit who are in charge of coordinating data collection in Worldfavor. Other users in the platform include colleagues that need to report specific data and answer questions, and the managing directors of each country unit who sign off on data collection.
Challenge
Manual workload & low engagement
As with many sustainability efforts, Intrum was tackling a huge amount of sustainability data with Excel sheets. These Excel sheets – one for social data and one for environmental data – were sent to local units to complete. This process, and the grouping and analysis of data, was all conducted manually.
This was the main reason Intrum decided to invest in a new system – it wanted to establish a smooth process that automated the most time-consuming parts of data collection, get a good overview of the data, and make it easy to compare the data historically and between local offices. It was critical that Intrum’s local offices could actually use sustainability data to inform decisions, track progress, and compare with other entities across the group.
Before implementing the platform, colleagues from all over Europe would answer questions and send the Sustainability Director a new, updated Excel sheet. Keeping track of the amount of new Excel sheets that were sent and updated – the latest version, where to find the relevant data for the task at hand, etc. was time-consuming and complex.
Intrum's Most Important Criteria
Instead of running all questions through one person – the Sustainability Director – it was crucial that colleagues could turn to each other and delegate questions amongst themselves. This would increase efficiency, teamwork, and transparency.
“It’s much easier when you don’t have several versions of a complex Excel sheet.”
Vanessa Söderberg, Sustainability Director intrum
Solution
Digitizing data collection globally
With Worldfavor's Sustainability Management solution, employees responsible for localizing the data receive a set of questions with extra, tailored information (i.e. where to retrieve the data) and an overview of the data, all in Worldfavor.
The questions are also answered in Worldfavor, which simplifies and clarifies communication between Intrum’s local offices. Whether a user spends a lot of time in Worldfavor or only needs to answer a specific question the software is easy to use and jump right in. This increases collaboration between colleagues and answers directly in the platform, rather than running everything through Vanessa.
It’s also possible to get an overview of the data regardless of where employees are located. This creates a more transparent approach to Intrum's sustainability efforts as each local office can compare its performance – know what they’re doing well at, what they can learn from other offices and areas of improvement.
“It’s really useful to have a good overview of the data. I’m really, really happy with it. I'm able to use the data in different channels internally and externally.”
Vanessa Söderberg, Sustainability Director
Result
Improved teamwork and data overview
Though reporting season is always a busy time, this year Vanessa has been able to focus on other work responsibilities – all because Worldfavor’s system automates many administrative tasks that she previously had to handle manually.
Year on year, they’ll easily be able to compare quantifiable sustainability data in a way that was not possible before Worldfavor. This enables Intrum to make more informed decisions and more effectively reach their goals – financial and sustainable.
Time spent collecting sustainability data has decreased while the quality of the data collected has increased. Not least, colleagues can follow up on local data immediately, rather than having to ask colleagues at Intrum’s HQ to get their hands on it. This ease of access makes data a key source to inform practical, everyday decisions that impact the success of Intrum’s sustainability efforts. For example, tangibly seeing the effect of decreasing business travels motivates sustainable changes across the group.
Because of Worldfavor, Intrum benefits from an efficient process for gathering data, gets an easy overview of sustainability data, tracks progress year-on-year, and can compare local units within the group.
Intrum currently reports on sustainability once a year, but thanks to Worldfavor’s ease of use, there are plans to report more often in the future, in order to gain even better insights about the sustainability work and its progress.
Solutions used in this case
Sustainability Management
Worldfavor's Sustainability Management solution enables organizations to understand and manage growing expectations on sustainable business practices.
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