Octagon Business Solutions is happy to announce the successful deployment of its Frontier software product in JD Group. The retail brands belonging to JD Group include household names like Joshua Doore, Russells, Bradlows, Morkels, Electric Express, Price `n Pride and Barnetts.
"We are proud to be associated with southern Africa`s largest furniture retailer," says Greg Brill, Managing Director of Octagon. "JD made it quite clear to us from the outset that flexibility, reliability and performance are `non-negotiable` for them. Having concluded this implementation of Frontier in a company of the JD Group`s calibre is quite an honour for us," says Brill.
Frontier is a credit application processing, credit decisioning and risk management system, which has been fully integrated into the JD Group point-of-sale system. This allows the JD Group to fully automate the decision regarding the granting of credit facilities, on applications meeting certain fixed criteria.
The credit applications are captured at more than 900 branches throughout southern Africa and then electronically delivered by means of the JD Group`s V-sat, wide area network to their corporate head quarters where Frontier processes the application.
Dick Behrens, Group Executive, Credit and Administration for JDG Trading, comments: "The number of credit applications peak at more than 15 000 per day. During the busy November, December trading period, Frontier handled the volumes without any problems or down time."
Brill added: "The recent buoyant Christmas period was the acid test for us. We can now comfortably say the Frontier implementation is successful."
Frontier communicates, through Octagon`s Secure Point of Contact (SPOC), with the Credit Bureaus and acquires the requisite Credit Bureau reports. Through the use of sophisticated scoring engines, decision trees and affordability calculations, Frontier then grants, declines or refers the specific credit application. Referrals, requiring human intervention, usually only occur where insufficient data is available on which to base the credit decision. The entire Frontier process is completed in less than 30 seconds.
The flexibility of Frontier allows the customer to change the decision trees and relevant criteria in the scoring engine without expensive and timeous programming. The customer may also change the process flow of applications and the relevant steps for various application types. These features give the customer significant flexibility and allows them to utilise the software tool to its fullest.
"Although Frontier comes with a proven track record of six years and is installed in various blue chip companies, we believe this deployment stands us in a strong position to integrate our solution to any number of the large retail credit providers. The scalability of Frontier also allows us to add value to small and large volume users with some ROIs of 12 months or less," concluded Brill.
Octagon Business Solutions is the leading IT credit solutions provider in SA with some 3 000 customers using many of its products since 1997.
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