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Sidetrade is the world leader in predictive solutions used to create value in the sales-to-cash cycle (i.e. from sale to payment) and customer relationships. Complementing its CRM and ERP solutions, Sidetrade’s cloud platform is one of a kind and relies on artificial intelligence to predict customers’ payment behaviors and speed up cash flow generation. More than 1,000 companies of all sizes and from all sectors, in 65 countries around the world, have adopted Sidetrade’s artificial intelligence solution to achieve sustainable growth.

Predictive analysis of customer cash flowsDepending on the year and country, payment delays faced by companies average 13-15 days. From a cash flow point of view, the stakes are high: depending on a company’s sales, a single day can cost several million euros. Sidetrade developed an all-in-one solution to anticipate payment behaviors designed to make company and financial directors’ overview easier, while helping them successfully achieve their digital transformation. Its solution is based on using massive quantities of Big Data.

“With Sidetrade Payment Intelligence, Sidetrade is the only publisher on the market to offer this type of strong value-added predictive analysis for customer analysis. Thanks to Big Data, financial departments are able to make realistic, fact-based forecasts. This new service makes it easier to anticipate and optimize the management of working capital, thus facilitating operating cash flow generation,” Olivier Novasque, CEO Sidetrade explains.

Sidetrade has designed heavy-duty machine learning-based algorithms that make it possible to perform predictive analyses of the payment behaviors of more than 5 million companies by analyzing 690 billion euros in transactions made over the last three years and representing 230 million inter-company payment experiences. All of these data are stored on Sidetrade’s cloud.

“The volumes of data we handle in order to score payment behaviors are absolutely mind-boggling,” Olivier Novasque continues. “We rely on a massively-parallel architecture running on Hadoop to anonymously process the terabytes representing the millions of payment experiences recorded in our cloud and we chose Talend to orchestrate the integration of these data.”

Why Talend?Even though Hadoop is a must these days for any Big Data project, the know-how needed to use it remains rare. Emphasizing on its ability to streamline data handing within a massively-parallel Hadoop architecture, Sidetrade found that Talend integrated perfectly into its information system as Talend’s solution offers all of the requisite connectors (Oracle, MongoDB, SQL Server).

“By making Hadoop simpler to adopt, Big Data ideally meets Sidetrade’s requirements; Talend’s solution is compatible with all of our relational databases and sets itself apart by being quick to pick up,” Christophe Migliorini, CTO at Sidetrade, explains. “With 40 to 60% of the total time required to complete a Big Data project spent on data extraction, cleaning and unification, Talend has helped us reduce this by a factor of 3 to 4.”

Anticipating customer behaviors today means predicting future customer relationships and speeding up cash generation

“Financial departments are able to compare their performance with regard to payment delays, both approved and unexpected, through a data-analysis based approach and not mere intuition.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Financial Services

INFORMATION• HQ: France

• 51-200 employees

USE CASE• Financial performance

CHALLENGE• Predictive Analysis of Customer Cash Flows

TALEND PRODUCT USED• Talend Big Data

RESULTS

• Analysis of €690 billion worth of transactions, i.e. 230 million customer experiences and 5 million companies over the past 3 years

• Big Data projects completed 3 to 4 times faster thanks to Talend

• Payment 1 day earlier = several million € (depending on the company’s sales)

”Olivier Novasque, CEO, Sidetrade

“Talend Big Data also generates native code in Hadoop without us having to rely on proprietary components, which for us, means a significant time savings since every month we collect and analyze millions of data. And the icing on the cake: the cost of using Talend is predictable and distributed evenly over the year,” Migliorini adds.

Last but not least, in addition to offering enhanced access to Hadoop technologies, lower storage prices and faster data processing in Sidetrade’s cloud, Talend also handles the quality of the data used for analysis. Oracle data are handily placed in a 5-node Hadoop data lake, then processed using MapReduce (and soon Spark), and sent on to Mongo DB. Data viewing is done with Tableau (both internally and for customers). Refreshing takes place on a daily basis.

Analyzing operational performance and anticipating payment behaviorsFor the first time, a Saas software publisher is offering its customers a scoring system based on machine learning algorithms and predictive analyses. The advantages of predictive analysis for financial departments are manifold.

“With this new platform, Sidetrade offers an all-in-one solution that enables company and financial directors to anticipate payment behaviors while helping them analyze operational performance in the sales-to-cash cycle taken as a whole. In parallel, it improves the efficiency of finance and sales by arming financial departments with real time control over business and revenue opportunities,” Olivier Novasque adds.

This way, financial departments can set 3, 6, 9 or 12-month cash generation goals and track them over time. They can act by shortening the payment terms allowed or comparing today’s performance to the goals set, either customer by customer or even by business unit.

“Talend is helping us rapidly and easily create this bird’s eye view of customer relationships using an extremely intuitive interface,” Olivier Novasque concludes.

Upon completion of this initial project, a strategic partnership was entered into with Talend to create and run a “Lambda”-type architecture taking advantage of Hadoop and combining real-time streaming and batch processing modes. In this environment, Talend enables statistical, anonymous and historical analyses of Sidetrade’s cloud data.

“Once you have a precise handle on your customer and how he pays his bills, the effect is twofold: first, you shorten your time to payment, thus generating cash. Second, you improve customer satisfaction! That’s why the sales-to-cash cycle needs to be considered from end-to-end, from the transaction to collecting payment.”

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