STILL is a leading international distributor of forklifts, trolleys and intra-logistics systems. The STILL enterprise is headquartered in Hamburg (Germany) and employs a global workforce of more than 7000 in its 14 German branches and 20 international subsidiaries. STILL’s Swiss operation has about 75 employees and is among the market leaders in the forklift segment. STILL sells, leases and services forklifts.
Over the past few years, STILL AG in Switzerland has observed a change in the mentality of some of its accounts receivable. The company recorded an increasing number of cases of businesses who already had trouble paying their debts tried to order products on account. Although STILL was spared the experience of major defaults as far as ist accounts receivable were concerned, the situation did take a turn for the worse – in particular during the crisis years of 2008 and 2009. In order to avert losses, the decision to check the creditworthiness of customers with stringent consistency was made. Astrid Hecht, Head of Finance and Administration: «Whenever we negotiate a sale to a new customer, we always conduct a credit check before we even order the products in-house. And we perform a second check before we ship the merchandise to the customer.» Even existing accounts are subjected to periodic credit checks. Last, but not least, the enterprise also analyzes the creditworthiness of its service customers at regular intervals.
