Feather in Cap for DIEBOLD - Alexander Hamilton Award

NORTH CANTON, Ohio — Diebold Inc. (NYSE: DBD), which provides self-service delivery and security systems and solutions, has earned the Alexander Hamilton Award, according to a news release. The award is an honor bestowed once a year to the top treasury/finance projects in the country by Treasury and Risk Management magazine.
Diebold earned the award for taking a whole new approach to its order-to-cash process, which includes customer order placement (that drives manufacturing, delivery and installation), contract management, billing, collections and credit, the release noted. The changes to is OTC process have resulted in "more satisfied customers," "faster turnaround time to collect payments," "a reduction of past due receivables by 49 percent" and "a reduction of write offs by 56 percent," to name a few.
"The award is usually won by very large companies like Lucent and Sun Microsystems, who were also recognized this year," said Robert J. Warren, Diebold vice president and treasurer, in the release. "Diebold may be the smallest company to ever receive it, making this award even more impressive and very exciting."
As with most companies, the OTC process belonged to multiple functions, which made it difficult to drive improvements. To address that, Diebold reorganized its OTC departments under the treasury group.
DIEBOLD's Initatives:
Diebold has exhibited great corporate goverance, process implementation and operational efficiency drive to achieve such order.
To promote awareness of the OTC effort and generate interest throughout the company, OTC members wore special pins and shirts. The promotional "attire" helped provide new opportunities to engage colleagues in discussion on the change initiative that generated improvement ideas. Additionally, the team identified process improvements applying Six Sigma techniques and created scorecards for each area to track progress. Benchmarking other companies was also an important step to improving the OTC process.
"A key to our success in implementing this change was demonstrating its companywide benefits to various internal functions outside of the finance area," said Timothy J. McDannold, vice president and assistant treasurer for Diebold, in the release. "When we evaluated our processes and compared them to benchmark data, it was clear we could do better. As a result of this team's work, and with our recent national recognition, we've now become one of the companies that others benchmark."