Companies of all sizes face the challenge of operating streamlined business proc-esses to reduce costs while maintaining or increasing process consistency. One of the areas where this most clearly demonstrated is in managing large volumes of in-voices:
Manual invoice keying, copying, and routing
Approval delays, and lack of transparency in process
Delayed payments resulting in missed discounts and late fees Tracking down PO’s and contracts
Answering vendor queries regarding payment Paper shipment, storage and retention
Fortunately, with advanced capture processes, intelligent extraction and workflow, these business issues can be solved with relative ease. Beach Street’s Invoice Auto-mation Accelerator (IAx) offers all of the tools necessary to improve your company’s invoice processing at a cost which yields rapid ROI!
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Invoice Automation Challenges
Client Case Study
Customer Profile: A large international wholesaler of construction supplies.
Problem: A large commercial supplier had grown to process 10,000 invoices/day by an
expensive, slow and error-prone manual process. Having reached its scaling limits, the process was resulting in missed vendor discounts and late payment fees.
Solution: Beach Street implemented an intelligent batch capture, data extraction and invoice routing solution built on Captiva InputAccel and Documentum. The invoice processing workflow included automated, intelligent routing and specific exception work queues, promoting speciali-zation of manual tasks.
Benefits:
90% of invoices processed without human intervention
Expansion to 700,000 invoices/year while reducing head count of AP Professionals Accelerated processing increased early payment discounts and reduced late pay-ment fees
Seamless integration with ERP system
Monitoring process to allow management tracking and bottleneck identification Proactive notifications of task completion and if thresholds of tasks in a queue are reached
Automated security and retention assured proper employee access and compliance standards were met, transparent to the end-user
System extended to accommodate other financial areas, including Expense Process-ing and Accounts Receivable
Professional Accounts Payable Associations estimate the average cost to process an invoice is $ 6.00-$8.00 with manual paper processes. Companies implementing invoice automation processes for invoice data capture and the approval workflow have realized cost savings, with cost per invoice in the $ 2.50 to $ 4.00 range. The savings can be significant for companies processing high volume of invoices and easily pay for the automation software with payback periods less than a year for some customers.
Beach Street’s Invoice Automation Solution is built on EMC Documentum’s xCP platform. Using TaskSpace as the main interface, the IAx solution man-ages the multiple workflow processes involved in invoice processing, begin-ning with the mail room and ending with a Supplier Payment in the ERP sys-tem, using rules based workflow.
AP managers gain insight into the invoice status and AP operational metrics through invoice status summaries and Dashboards. Custom reports are a key benefit to the IAx solutions. In addition to tracking invoice progress through the review and approval process, reports such as “Overdue Pay-ments” can identify overdue invoices and which department is consistently lagging, causing late payments.
The Supplier Portal is provided with a simple login screen to allow the Sup-pliers to access the system, review their invoice status, and upload support-ing documents.
This graphic details information flow in the Invoice Automation process: invoices are captured via email, fax, EDI or scanner; invoice data is extracted with intelligent OCR and validated against the ERP; the invoice then creates a voucher in the ERP, once approved.
Using EMC Captiva’s InputAccel for Invoices (IAI), Beach Street’s IAx Solu-tion makes use of intelligent, targeted OCR to extract header informaSolu-tion such as Invoice Number, Invoice Total and Invoice Date, among others. Supplier data is populated for each invoice via an ERP lookup based on the invoice’s identified vendor.
Using Taskspace, Beach Street’s Status reporting brings up to the minute reports on the status of invoices from “scan time” to payment. With dynamically chang-ing status indicators (Green, Yellow, and Red), it is easy for all users to deter-mine the status of an invoice. No more calling everyone in the company trying to determine where the invoice is temporarily stopped, and who is responsible for sending it to the next step in the process.
Vendors can check the real time status of an process in-voice via updates to an externally facing Supplier Portal.
Contact
Call us!
Contact your local EMC Sales representative or visit www.emc.com
EMC Corporation Hopkinton Massachusetts 01748-9103 1-508-435-1000 In North America 1-866-464-7381
Beach Street Consulting 10 G St NE Ste 710 Washington DC 20002 866.232.2478 www.beachstreet.net
Solution Architecture
Beach Street’s solution incorporates not only EMC’s software stack in xCP and InputAc-cel for Invoices (IAI), but integrates with your ERP and your office applications. Each
suite is scalable, and capable of being entirely virtualized at all levels.
Vendor, PO Info Lookup
Watch Directory Scan Captiva/Dispatcher ERP Finance Department Inv_<Vendor>_<Date>...
Structure, Security, & Retention
Data Extraction/ Lookup Invoice Number Vendor Name Purchase Date Subtotal Grand Total Payment Terms 10010 Acme Products 30 January 2008 $ 6,014.81 $ 6,025.88 Net 30 Days Data Matching Documentum
