Markets Wired

Manpower France anticipates and drives change in the world of work by breaking new ground with Aimie, Sidetrade’s cutting edge Artificial Intelligence system. To optimize Credit Management, Manpower equipped their Finance team with Sidetrade’s ground breaking technology, now available to all of Sidetrade’s customers.

With an annual income of €4 bn per year, Manpower France collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. To handle this volume, and increasingly complex payment procedures, Manpower’s Finance department started using Sidetrade technology in 2013. Sidetrade accelerates automation of the order-to-cash process, and models collection strategies for different segments of clientele. As a result, Manpower France improved their efficiency with a significant reduction in days sales outstanding.

Despite this excellent performance, considering the complexity of the purchasing process, and exponential growth in data, Sidetrade decided to enrich their platform with Artificial Intelligence technology.

“Our solution, like all automation software, was based on a set of predetermined scenarios, which needed to be regularly revised by business experts. On top of this, Sidetrade added Artificial Intelligence, which exploits the profusion of data available on customer payment behavior, to provide financial teams with the best possible recommendations in real time”, explains Jean-Cyril Schütterlé, Chief Product Officer at Sidetrade.

As a player in the evolution of the world of work, Manpower already uses AI in its interactions with its candidates and clients to support them in constantly changing environments. Manpower France’s Finance department was therefore an ideal candidate to test drive Sidetrade’s new AI platform, named Aimie.

Aimie, AI to adapt to individual customer behavior in real time

Aimie had been trained on 230,000,000 B2B payment experiences, totaling sales of over 700 billion euros [£621 bn] over the past three years. Based on this unique knowledge, Aimie analyzes each Manpower customer account to determine the best collection strategy, according to a multitude of criteria, such as buyer and seller profiles, characteristics of the invoice, and business relations history, including any disputes.

“Aimie analyzes what has worked before, directly executes automatic follow-up actions, and establishes which past-dues to target first. She considers available resources in order to take optimal actions. We started Aimie off with two customer portfolios for a period of two months. Encouraged by the results, we ramped up our use of Aimie. Within four months, Aimie was managing nearly 60% of single-site customers, which represents over 5,000 accounts, and nearly 10,000 follow-up actions per month”, says Laurent Bueno, Credit Director of Manpower France. “With over 700 payer centers to manage, it is impossible for a manager to call all the debtors in their portfolio. Aimie helps them decide which customers to contact first.” After nine months of testing, the results are clear: with support from Aimie, effectiveness of recovery actions grew 12%.

“Aimie allows our teams to focus on higher-added-value tasks. We dismiss any alarmist talk about Artificial Intelligence. We actually see AI as a way to let us focus on real human know-how”, concludes Laurent Bueno . 

• Manpower France adopte Aimie, l’IA de Sidetrade
• Manpower adopts Aimie, the Sidetrade’s AI