A leading provider of overhead and garage door systems needed to make the transformation from a manual to a digital world in order to cut its invoice processing costs and improve audit quality.
Each of the company’s five divisions had been managing and maintaining their own content systems. Not only was this costly, but without any integration between these systems and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), the intake and processing of AP invoices — company-wide — remained paper-based and time-consuming. AP invoices were extremely hard to procure from storage for auditing purposes.
In all, the company’s divisions needed to consolidate to one platform to reduce costs and to better handle all AP invoice imaging/creation, processing and auditing needs.
The Financial Impact
According to research conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIM), companies spend $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document. But these processing costs can be reduced by up to 40% with a high level of invoice process automation.
In addition, auditing presents a huge cost burden as well. Preparing audit data is time-consuming and may shut down other operations if it requires AP employees to work non-stop in support of the process. Boxes of invoices need to be requested and sorted, and (in spite of best intentions) documents will still go missing since the tracking of information is often based on in-house knowledge that is not retained as people move around.
Keste Solution
Keste streamlined the invoice intake process by implementing an end-to-end, integrated Oracle solution utilizing WebCenter Imaging, WebCenter Content and WebCenter Capture. The solution utilizes WebCenter Capture to grab invoices submitted through multiple channels (email, scan, fax, snail mail). Users are then able to examine, annotate and release the invoices through an integrated image viewer to WebCenter Imaging, which indexes and stores them in a central content repository (WebCenter Content) for search and retrieval purposes.
The invoices are also attached to AP transactions within Oracle EBS, allowing finance/ accounting users to view the actual document during invoice processing. As an added benefit, users can also store and retrieve other relevant documents (packing slips, etc.) from the WebCenter Content repository – all within the familiarity of their known EBS interfaces.
Results
The solution’s biggest benefit is better monitoring of invoice status, and therefore, improved process transparency. By having invoices and other relevant documents sit in one central repository, users now have instant access, making the system much more valuable to everyone and boosting adoption rates.
Bottlenecks have been eliminated, and fewer invoices are lost. This has improved productivity since there has been a huge reduction in the amount of time spent searching for information. In addition, there are better records for audit trails and litigation, providing instant access to needed documents — eliminating the 3-6 month wait time for boxes of information.
There have been additional savings due to reduced paper costs and paper transportation costs. The ability to turn invoices around faster not only eliminates late-payment fees and supports the establishment of dynamic discounting, but also allows for improved cash flow planning.
Organizations that choose to integrate the automation benefits of Oracle WebCenter to their Accounts Payable Invoicing system will realize a very rapid return on their investment as the right content is delivered at the right time.
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