By Legal Futures’ Associates LexisNexis Visualfiles
The UK’s largest privately owned credit-hire and post-accident services provider, EDAM Group, is investing in the workflow and case management system, LexisNexis® Visualfiles™, as the organisation’s technology platform for growth. Visualfiles will underpin EDAM Group’s business environment with a single technology platform across its service offerings including credit hire, credit repair and personal injury. With more than 400 staff using the Visualfiles solution for day-to-day operations, the Group will realise significant time efficiencies and cost savings while scaling the business for growth.
EDAM Group’s application of case and matter management principles for credit hire and post-accident services represents a truly innovative approach to business management.
Explaining EDAM Group’s business rationale for deploying Visualfiles, Phil Wood, Group IT Director, said, “There are several big wins for us. Foremost, the flexibility of the Visualfiles technology is phenomenal. We are applying the solution to our credit hire business with the same ease as another traditional firm would for legal case and matter management.
“Additionally, we are a rapidly growing company – we have grown to £88 million turnover in a very short space of time and this trend will continue. Visualfiles is genuinely scalable and easy to develop whilst being incredibly powerful. Having undertaken a review of the market we took the view that its capabilities go well beyond its competitors.”
All Visualfiles related product development will be undertaken in-house, which will deliver the ability to quickly enhance capability to meet rapidly evolving market needs.
Wood, added, “We will make substantial savings in staff training costs. There is no longer a need to constantly upskill staff exclusively for different technology systems. The power of Visualfiles is such that it drives continual improvement and will enable our developers to routinely and incrementally develop the solution to meet new business requirements. That’s how easy it is to enhance application functionality within Visualfiles.”
EDAM Group’s fleet department will be the first team to go live on Visualfiles. The solution will be used to manage the fleet assets end-to-end – including everything from vehicle acquisition, pre-delivery checks, delivery, damage through to MOT and taxation. Wood commented, “In essence, rather than the traditional approach of using Visualfiles for managing individual ‘cases’, we will use the solution to manage ‘vehicles’, in fact 4,000 vehicles will be managed through Visualfiles annually.”
The Group is integrating Visualfiles with several third-party systems and data sources. Integration with World Pay for credit card payments, will allow the Group to recover costs from customers who incur penalties such as speeding fines and parking tickets on their hired vehicles more quickly and efficiently. Currently, the team deals with approximately 50 penalty charge notes a day, which on average, takes 30 minutes each to recover. Once the fleet management service is live on Visualfiles, this time will instantly reduce to 5 minutes.
Other integrations with Visualfiles include the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Motor Insurance Anti-Fraud and Theft Register (MIAFTR), CDL for MOT data, and the Group’s vehicle tracking system, as examples. This will provide EDAM with the ability to closely track and monitor its fleet assets, which represent significant investment for service the credit hire service provided by the business.
“EDAM Group is a dynamic company that is well grounded in its ethos of achieving excellence with the innovative use of technology,” Simon Farthing, Commercial and Marketing Director, LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions, commented. “Their relentless drive to improve all facets of their process and to find ingenious ways of improving service makes them a great ambassador for the capabilities of Visualfiles and makes Visualfiles perfectly suited as the tool of choice for a business looking to stay at the forefront of its market.”
