Washington, D.C. — The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) today announced the winners of its 2019 Operations and Technology Excellence Award: Cisco Systems Capital Corporation is recognized for Project Excellence and John Deere Financial is recognized for Excellence in Innovation. The two award-winning projects will be showcased during ELFA’s Operations and Technology Conference, Sept. 16-18 at the Hilton Chicago.

Project Excellence: Cisco Systems Capital Corporation is recognized for designing and implementing a single credit platform that enables sales. The company retired its former credit systems and replaced them with a consolidated platform to drive continued innovation and maintain best-of-breed credit practices. The new system accelerates credit decisioning, serves as a sole credit portal and upholds credit policy. The result is improved work flow, a simplified and more efficient credit approval process and reduced operating expenses.

Excellence in Innovation: John Deere Financial is recognized for developing an automated equipment inventory system. Using telematics technology, the new system enables the geo-location of equipment to verify its presence at dealerships. The new system, which is in trial stages, connects data from disparate platforms and offers a simple dashboard that makes it easy to verify the presence of hundreds of high-value assets at dealerships at any given time and identify inventory discrepancies. Moving from manual inventory inspection to automated inspection has the potential to streamline the inventory inspection process, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs.

“The Operations and Technology Excellence Award Committee is excited to have received a record number of submissions this year,” said Jennifer Martin, VP, Leasing and Vendor Program Support at Key Equipment Finance and Subcommittee Chair for the award. “Through many sessions of review and scoring, the committee felt the award candidates fell into two main categories: Project Excellence and Excellence in Innovation. With the support of the ELFA, we’re happy to be able to recognize both. John Deere Financial’s project embodies innovation, evolving a manual inventory management process using GPS technology, advanced analytics and business model changes and visualizations. Cisco Systems Capital Corporation’s credit platform implementation utilizes best practices in success criteria definition, timeline management as well as training and change management.  We’re extremely excited to highlight both of these projects at the upcoming Operations and Technology Conference.”

“We applaud all of our award applicants, whose work is a testament to the technology innovation underway in the equipment finance industry,” said ELFA President and CEO Ralph Petta. “We are honored to recognize Cisco Systems Capital Corporation and John Deere Financial, whose winning projects serve as a model on the effective use of technology in our industry. We congratulate both companies for their cutting-edge solutions.”

The Operations and Technology Excellence Award identifies and recognizes equipment leasing and finance companies that have demonstrated best practices in developing and implementing innovative uses of technology or creative business processes to improve operations, enhance customer interactions, enter new markets and build overall ROI. The program brings the backroom to the foreground, spotlighting the best in the industry as an example for others. More information about the award and a list of previous winners is available at www.elfaonline.org/about/awards/OTE.  

Information about the 2019 ELFA Operations and Technology Conference, Sept. 16-18 at the Hilton Chicago, is available at www.elfaonline.org/events/2019/OT.  

About ELFA

The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) is the trade association that represents companies in the $1 trillion equipment finance sector, which includes financial services companies and manufacturers engaged in financing capital goods. ELFA members are the driving force behind the growth in the commercial equipment finance market and contribute to capital formation in the U.S. and abroad. Its 580 members include independent and captive leasing and finance companies, banks, financial services corporations, broker/packagers and investment banks, as well as manufacturers and service providers. For more information, please visit www.elfaonline.org.

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