Quick overview

The Creditreform Group is Germany’s leading provider of business information, marketing data and receivables management solutions and has been protecting companies against payment defaults since 1879.

Every day, almost 4,000 employees work with commitment and foresight for their customers. With 162 offices in Europe and a worldwide business network, Creditreform is available in every economic region – personally and digitally. Together with 162,000 member companies, Creditreform forms a strong and protective community that connects people and companies. In this way, Creditreform strengthens mutual trust in the business world and makes a valuable contribution to securing the economy in the long term.

Initial situation

Many historically grown forms & high maintenance effort.

The Verband der Vereine Creditreform e.V. initially had many historical forms that were implemented and further developed using conventional form languages. The stored source code was therefore very confusing. Due to process security, separate forms were used for each sales organization (VkOrg). Different calculation schemas were used in the SD area. The complexity lay in the fact that the condition types were linked to the processes, billing types, sales document types and organizational units. This posed a major risk of side effects in the event of changes or adjustments. In addition, there were always many requirements from the specialist departments that had to be implemented by us as an external service provider until the use of SSP Forms in 2017.

The maintenance effort for the large number and complexity of the existing forms was extremely high. Over the years, the SAP® developers at VVC have gone to the trouble of incorporating every single requirement into the company-specific forms. As a result, the forms became increasingly complex and opaque, so that even experienced developers needed at least 1-2 days to analyze the forms for new requirements.

Specifications & implementation

Existing form templates for new developments & reorganization.

After our preparatory workshop, we started with the SD forms and then gradually converted the FI forms for dunning notices, payment advice notes, account statements and balance confirmations. In doing so, we recorded the company-specific requirements and then tried to implement these requirements in such a way that we use a basic form for all sales organizations. This works extremely well with SSP Forms. As a result, we rely on existing form templates for our form development and use these as the basis for the new development. This also gives us the opportunity to tidy up the forms and reorganize them.

This was followed by a two-day customizing workshop. The developers at VVC were then able to actively adapt the forms via customizing. Today, Softway AG only takes on tasks relating to data procurement and the layout of the form.