Rutronik tells its story: beyond the numbers

For the Rutronik administration, finance and control team, maintaining direct contact with customers and suppliers is a priority. Alberto Ottolini, who as Finance Director has been leading the team for 15 years, tells us about this.

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ottolini rutronik

The Finance area of Rutronik Italy, The Finance department of Rutronik Italia, although it manages a complex business with almost two thousand customers and six operating sites, is a lean structure headed by Alberto Ottolini since 2006. The team that works closely with the manager consists of two resources fully dedicated to customer management with a particular focus on the credit area for the granting of operational overdraft facilities and payment reminders, while one resource is dedicated to suppliers, personnel and general accounting.

"All credit management and recovery activities are carried out internally because we believe that direct contact with the customer always provides a competitive advantage," says Alberto Ottolini, who personally supervises the various activities, reporting/controlling towards the parent company, services (IT, offices and car fleet) and the legal part. " When the insolvency situation exceeds the recovery times set by our credit policy or, in the presence of insolvency proceedings, we rely on the professionalism of a law firm," says the financial director, pointing out that the solvency situation in the distribution market has improved "with the disappearance, or almost, of those players characterised by chronic financial instability. Rutronik, on the other hand, is very solid from a financial point of view: founded in 1973 by Helmut Rudel, it is an independent, family-run group whose main shareholder is still its founder. The Italian subsidiary will exceed 90 million in turnover this year, a figure that corresponds to a 7% share of the Italian distribution market.

Rutronik Team Finance
Rutronik's Finance area. From left: Alberto Ottolini, Paolo Brenna, Antonella Fava, Claudia Ferrari.

What does it mean for a broadliner distributor like Rutronik to manage the areas of administration-finance-control?

Our speciality is to offer our customers not only a very diversified product portfolio, but also and above all, customised solutions together with advanced technical and logistical support. Specifically, the administrative-financial area must be able to support the customer with solutions that allow him to optimise the management of his working capital and cultivate a lasting relationship with him, including regular visits and exchanges of opinion. In short, for us, being close to the customer does not just mean requesting a payment or visiting him when things are not going as we would like, but maintaining relations over time. We apply the same philosophy to our main suppliers: for example, the credit insurance company with which we have worked for years and the law firm with which we also have a long relationship.

What are the main financial risks faced by a distributor and how do you protect yourself against them?

The risks may lie in an unbalanced management of working capital, given that the average payment times of Italian customers are rather long compared to the European landscape. For this reason, in addition to using a credit insurance policy, we have drawn on asset back security instruments in the past, while today we use factoring.

Rutronik has a model whereby strategies and decisions are managed locally: is this also true for the financial side? What are the inputs from the parent company?

The parent company provides a series of centralised services, including financial services, with cash pooling treasury management. However, the Italian subsidiary is completely independent in its credit management, as it uses a different insurance company from the one relied on by the Group. In 2021, Rutronik Italy also took part in a pilot project at European level to decentralise sales, marketing and finance activities by forming, together with Spain and Portugal, the "Southern Europe" region, whose leadership is entrusted to the Italian Country Manager. From our point of view, working closely with our Spanish and Portuguese colleagues has certainly been easy, precisely because there are undeniable affinities between our countries. In recent years, German management has realised that each country has different needs and that controlling everything centrally is not always the best choice.

What were the main difficulties you faced in the year of the pandemic from a financial point of view? Do you see any similarities with what happened with the 2009 crisis?

The main difficulty that emerged during the pandemic was the drop in turnover while, to our amazement, the quality of payments never dropped to worrying levels, thanks also to the support of state interventions and the far-sightedness of our insurance company, which has always supported us by leaving insurance credit lines unchanged. The crisis of 2008-2009, which lasted at least until 2012, put us in greater difficulty due to the loss of a strategic client in terms of turnover. With the pandemic, on the other hand, the moment of uncertainty came only when the problem broke out, when we had to figure out how to organise ourselves to react, but otherwise, thanks to a diversified range of products covering several sectors and a diverse customer base, we continued to receive orders. Of course, there is now the problem of material allocation, but the order book is high and gives us hope for the coming months. It has to be said, though, that a phase of strong growth will undoubtedly be followed by a downturn when orders stop and customers start asking for postponements. The market nowadays experiences very close peaks, upwards and downwards, whereas in the past the phases of growth and decline were much more diluted in time.

Management control, administration and finance are areas that we normally associate with 'numbers', but whoever holds a role in these spheres of business is also required to have analytical and communication skills. How do you learn and improve these 'soft skills'?

The managerial skills that characterise the role of an administrative and financial manager have to be applied in a very complex strategic and organisational context in which, in addition to the obvious managerial skills, realisation skills (creativity, decision making and flexibility) and interpersonal skills (teamwork, conflict management and change leadership) are becoming increasingly important. Thanks to the quality of my team, and of the entire company, at Rutronik we were able to make a real transition from hard skills to soft skills during the pandemic period, and we were able to maintain contact on a daily basis, even if we all worked from home. In my role, I tried to stay close to each member of my office in the most appropriate way: for someone it was important to receive instructions and clear objectives, for someone else to be motivated at all times. From a practical point of view, the parent company gave us the necessary tools to continue working and collaborating remotely.

Do you think, therefore, that a new way of working has been inaugurated?

I believe a hybrid model will emerge. We are strongly motivated to regain our indispensable social relations in presence, as well as to preserve the positive things we have learned during this period by focusing on a better quality of professional and personal life. We realised that you can work well from a distance, but you need to strike the right balance: initially, our enthusiasm for always being able to work remotely waned in the long run, especially since we were working at home and not always in the best conditions for working at home. Today we would like to offer everyone the opportunity to work in a truly "smart" mode, to reconcile work and personal needs, and perhaps to conceive office spaces differently, favouring sharing and abandoning the concept of a fixed workstation. We have to deal with the parent company to make decisions in this area, but I am confident that we will be able to carve out the necessary autonomy here as well.

About Alberto Ottolini

ottolini rutronikAfter graduating in Business Administration from Bocconi University in 1990, he started working as Financial Control and Accountant in Unilever and then, after about four years, in Versalis, an Eni company. From 1997 to 2006 she was Financial Controller of the ElettroGiBi division of ITW Industrial Components, managing, also as "ad interim" Operations Manager, corporate restructuring projects in Italy and abroad. For the last fifteen years he has been Financial Director of Rutronik Italia.


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