About the Dulevo Fayat Group

The Dulevo Fayat Group is an Italian company specialising in the production and sale of cleaning machines, offering a wide range of products from large industrial cleaners to smaller units for specialised applications. 

Since 2021, Dulevo has been part of the Fayat Group, a French international conglomerate with more than 220 companies worldwide and a global turnover exceeding €6.5 billion.

As a single company without international subsidiaries, Dulevo manages its operations centrally from Italy with a small treasury team. Despite their focused organisational structure, they handle significant foreign currency exposure with approximately 10% of their turnover in US dollars.

The FX Challenge

Before implementing Kantox, Dulevo's approach to foreign exchange management was highly manual and reactive, creating several challenges for the company:

Before Kantox, it was manual management. It was made on spot. And it was, let me say... subjective. It was not objective. And we couldn't avoid, we couldn't eliminate the volatility risk before." - Andrea Dioni, CFO, Dulevo.

Operational inefficiencies characterised the company's FX operations. Their Excel-based process was manual, lacking automation and direct connection to orders. This forced them to hedge in large, imprecise amounts that rarely aligned with their actual business needs. 

This approach exposed Dulevo to three main challenges:

1. Volatility risk - The company needed to be focused on its core business and not afraid of the impact of exchange rates and market volatility. 
2. Small Treasury team - With a small treasury team, managing FX was eating up far too much valuable time, pulling focus away from other critical tasks the finance team needed to handle.
3. High costs - The costs associated with bank commissions consistently reduced their profit margins.

The Kantox Solution

Having used Kantox and experienced its benefits in his previous company, Dulevo's CFO, Andrea Dioni, knew the platform could effectively address their FX challenges. The company chose Kantox primarily for its customisation capabilities:

"I think that the added value of Kantox is the customisation, because Kantox can follow the needs of the company. In my opinion, this is the big added value different from the other solutions that we found on the market." - Andrea Dioni, CFO, Dulevo.

Dulevo particularly valued Kantox's ability to provide an automated currency management solution that could be tailored to their specific business requirements. This was essential given the impact even small currency fluctuations could have on their margins.

The implementation process was remarkably efficient, with the entire solution deployed in approximately one month, including Dulevo's internal time commitment.

Transformative Results

Since implementing Kantox, Dulevo has experienced substantial improvements in its FX management approach:

• Complete Elimination of Volatility Risk: The most valuable achievement, according to Dulevo's CFO, is that they no longer worry about exchange rate fluctuations.
• Cost Savings: Reduced bank commission costs by approximately €50,000 per year.
• Dramatic Time Efficiency: Saved approximately one hour per day in manual processing (equivalent to 200 hours annually).
• Operational Stability: After initial setup and minor adjustments, the system now runs automatically with only quarterly oversight required.
• Focus on Core Business: Management can concentrate on manufacturing and sales operations without currency concerns.

Looking Ahead

Dulevo is highly satisfied with their current Kantox implementation, with minimal changes needed since the initial deployment. Their future plans include potentially expanding the solution to manage different bank accounts, but they intend to maintain the same core system that has served them so effectively.