Finance Company Adopts FuseMetrix and Sees Immediate Results

Following the 2007 credit crunch, as the UK entered the Great Recession, Alliance Asset Management, under the guidance of CEO Jeremy Lavallin, made the decision to invest in moving its entire operation to a single online platform.

The decision to move to FuseMetrix facilitated new and strong business efficiencies, which in turn assisted the company to weather the recession and grow into an operation with a £14,000,000 turnover within ten years

Customer benefits at a glance:

• Supported business growth of £11,000,000 without swapping or upgrading technologies
• Functionality required by all departments on a single technology platform
• Accurate business reports on all departments
• Facilitated fact-based decision-making
• Ongoing, mutually beneficial development, so the FuseMetrix solution doesn’t age
• Supported business growth through and after the 2007 – 2009 recession
• Delivered company-wide efficiency improvements
• Technology comes with a continual efficiency improvement pledge from FuseMetrix
• No conceivable reason why the business would ever need to migrate platforms
• Technology overheads are stable, despite aggressive business growth
• Provided accurate, real-time business transparency, measurement and monitoring ability
• Enabled Alliance Asset Management to set new, industry-leading exemplary reporting benchmarks with funding bodies
• Supports FCA audits and helps maximise the benefits gained from audit consultants

The challenge

Alliance Asset Management provides vehicle funding solutions to cover every conceivable requirement. Established in 1997 as a plc, CEO, Jeremy Lavallin, bought out all the shares and converted Alliance into a limited company. Improving efficiency was his priority.
 
Each department had its own system. Packages included Sage, Goldmine, a fleet management system and other mainstream business technologies. The lack of infrastructure unity caused duplication, conflicting reports on the same customers, and a host of other issues.
 
The finance, sales and management teams were all looking at different sets of records; it was impossible to make management decisions based on accurate data without substantial, time-consuming manual intervention.


 
The solution

Following up on a recommendation, Jeremy gave the FuseMetrix team a tall order: he needed all the functionality currently provided by all the company’s systems, on a single cloud-based platform.
 
“Ten years ago we were early adopters of FuseMetrix and so we put a substantial amount of work in to ensure it would fit our requirements like a glove.
 
“Although other companies benefit from the developments we specified in the finance modules, we benefit from the efficiencies gained in other organisations. If an organisation using FuseMetrix develops a best practice, the improvement is shared across the platform,” explained Jeremy.
 
Alliance Asset Management invested in efficiency as part of a long-term growth plan in which:

• the business could remain on the same technology platform
• infrastructure overheads would remain the same, regardless of business growth curves
• the business could benefit from technological development, without further capex.

 There wasn’t – and, ten years later, still isn’t – anything like FuseMetrix available on the market, although there’s a possibility of developing SAP at a much greater cost.
 

The results

“The most powerful improvements FuseMetrix has delivered is accurate reporting and business controls.
 
“The development of passive knowledge is a huge danger to most companies because it’s based on hunches, impressions and assumptions which people gradually start to perceive as facts on which decisions are often made.
 
“From FuseMetrix reports, we can prove our statistics are accurate before any decisions are made,” explained Jeremy.
 
FuseMetrix gave the Alliance Asset Management team the ability to say “this is what I can prove happens” instead of “this is what I think happens” within the business.
 
Prior to using FuseMetrix, producing comparable and accurate reports from information stored across the business would have been a time-consuming manual task. Many fast-moving businesses wouldn’t be able to accommodate this, particularly if they didn’t have spare technically skilled staff in the workforce.
 
The second powerful benefit FuseMetrix has given is business control.
 
“There’s a business adage which says: if you can’t count it, you can’t change it. The simple fact is that we can count it.
 
“The efficiency gains were substantial and, although difficult to quantify, they certainly helped us though the recession. We intend to stay on FuseMetrix because it helps keep the business lean – there’s always the possibility of another recession ahead,” commented Jeremy.
 
The FuseMetrix team regularly study customers’ systems and processes to proactively identify new efficiencies and ensure that client operations are as efficient as they can possibly be.
 
“This can be particularly valuable as long-standing direct employees sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees.
 
“I would say that, compared to our competitors, we’re one of the most efficient when you look at our portfolio of services,” he added.
 
In addition, Alliance Asset Management is regularly praised by its funders and bankers. They consider FuseMetrix to be unique in the marketplace, and the level of reporting it’s brought to Jeremy and his team is used as an example for other organisations.
 
In addition, FuseMetrix provides transparency, so that senior management can monitor customer service (daily) and prove to the FCA that every client is treated fairly. It also supports a clear understanding of customer journeys, so FCA audits are no longer a concern – in fact, they’re treated as a free consultancy service.
 
FuseMetrix has provided a robust and flexible platform on which Alliance Asset Management has grown its turnover from £3,000,000 to £14,000,000 and its workforce from 8 to 42.
 
“We’re so happy with FuseMetrix that we’ve introduced it to some of our clients so they can benefit from the same kind of transparency, controls and accurate reporting as we do,” Jeremy concluded. 



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