Finding ways of using technology to achieve Lowell’s goals is a key part of the IT Department’s work. Norway’s IT team is constantly searching for new technologies that will bring improved automation, increased efficiencies and cost savings. Lowell Norway’s Business Development Manager talks about a game-changing solution they have implemented which is fast becoming a critical component of their Roadmap for the future.

We’ve just broken a record here in Lowell Norway

All of us across the entire Lowell organization have achieved something remarkable over the last few years. We’ve come together from different companies, from different regions around the world, often with very different ways of doing things. We’ve been working hard to bring in new technologies that enable us to automate and work together more efficiently as a business.

In a similar way, all Lowell clients have individual ways of collecting data and work with a variety of IT systems. Some use the latest platform technology, others, legacy systems, while a few more are still using paper receipts. One of our jobs in IT is to integrate client systems with those at Lowell, ensuring that client data can be easily accessed and used by Lowell employees and that our clients can rapidly access the information they need from us.

But with so many different systems, each client integration brings its own set of challenges. The process can take a team of developers months, just to get a single client on board. In Lowell Norway alone, we serve over 3,000 clients. We needed to find a faster, more efficient method for client integrations and onboarding. We were determined to find a flexible process that would allow us to scale, integrating more clients in less time with fewer developers and IT personnel.

Breaking new ground and a record at Lowell.

We set a new record earlier this year by bringing the typical lengthy integration process down to just two days. That’s just two days for a full client integration. And we did this with a team of only three people.

Faster integration means that the team at Lowell Norway can start using client data more efficiently and our IT teams can quickly move on to other projects. But it also benefits clients. The onboarding process can be a big risk for them. The longer the process takes, the longer our client is exposed to this risk.

So how did we achieve this record? What started as a tailor-made project with a small team including Norwegian IT firm, Greenbird Integration Technology, has transformed into us having access to their generic modern technology platform that anyone working with data who needs to transform something into something else can use. We use Greenbird’s cloud-based integration Platform as a Service called Cloudwheel. This modern iPaaS solutions simplifies complex data integrations in a managed service and helps us to map and connect the information and processes that drive our business success. The difference with our Cloudwheel solution today is the extensive library of pre-configured integrations we have developed and specifically designed for Lowell. With many iPaaS solutions, integrations are manually created (which is why it took 2-3 months on average or even longer). With Cloudwheel as the orchestration system, we can reduce the time-consuming part that typically requires developer resources and allows us to configure any mapping that the Lowell organization wants to implement. Once configured they can be reused across our organization in any flow as pre-configured mapping in the dropdown menu dramatically reducing the time for us to onboarding new clients.

Because it is cloud-based, Cloudwheel gives us scalability as well. We can introduce the data integrations from as many new clients as we need. This also makes it easier to monitor integrations in real-time which we were not able to do previously. Any errors will trigger alerts and can be quickly fixed.

One further benefit of implementing Cloudwheel is that we’ve used it to establish an integration to the NOVA Debt Management solution. This presents us with enormous opportunities for integrating customer data with our operational systems, helping with collaboration, automation and efficiencies.

Digital transformation is an imperative for Lowell as we continue to grow. Finding ways that we can use technology to achieve our organization’s goals is a key part of our work in IT. We are constantly searching for new technologies that can bring our organization improved automation, greater measurability, increased business process efficiencies and more cost savings. At the same time, we look for ways to reduce risk by using standard tools, skilled experts and best practices to create new solutions. For Lowell Norway we see working with Cloudwheel and the agile team at Greenbird as a critical component of our roadmap for delivering the transformation we need.

If you would like to learn more about how we utilize Cloudwheel to simplify data integration and get insights into the business processes and debt cases in-flow in Norway, please connect with me to organize a personal demonstration.

Carl-Petter Udvang
Business Development Manager at Lowell