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Situation
This company's tires and products are
a part of a billion dollar international
holding company that distributes tires,
wheels, equipment, and tire supplies to
40,000 tire stores around the country.
The company faced a serious problem resulting
from recent mergers and a growing customer
base. The amount of paper work accumulated
by the accounts receivable department
was increasing rapidly with no end in
sight.
After the recent merger of the company,
the number of daily deliveries had grown
to 15,000 and was expected to reach 30,000
within two years. As the number of customers
and daily deliveries rose, so did the
number of aged accounts.
As a result, the credit department was
finding it difficult to process the documentation
involved in accounting for collections
from late payers.
To monitor late paying accounts, the
company's accounting system would output
onto greenbar paper a weekly aging report
of the accounts with overdue balances.
However, because the invoices and signed
delivery receipts were being returned
by the truck drivers to the company's
52 distribution centers, it was difficult
for the Credit Department personnel to
verify that the merchandise had actually
been delivered.
To further complicate matters, information
about each customer's credit limits was
not consistently maintained, nor was it
immediately accessible to the credit agents.
What they needed was a turnkey system
where scanning and automated data entry
would be used to capture data from the
invoices while storing and indexing the
images into a central repository, thus
making them accessible to the credit department.
Solution – Productivity
and Cost Efficiency
The chosen solution consisted of OCR
for Forms - automated data entry software
from Microsystems Technology - and OnBase
integrated document management software
from Hyland Software.
Using a Kodak document scanner, documents
are scanned into OCR for Forms. Using
"zonal" optical character recognition,
OCR for Forms automatically identifies
and extracts from the forms six key values
that are a) posted into company's accounting
system and b) used to index the images
into OnBase. Read rates on these invoices
are over 97% accurate, greatly reducing
the need for human verification.
The images and index information are then
captured by the OnBase Document Import
process and imported into the OnBase system.
Agents can now retrieve any invoice from
their desktop PC using the flexible searching
capabilities of the OnBase Client. However,
the primary accounting tool used by the
credit agents is the aging report.
The OnBase COLD processing module imports
the aging report from company's UNIX-based
accounting system directly into the OnBase
repository, allowing credit agents to
quickly conduct an online search of the
aging reports for information pertaining
to their assigned accounts.
The unique cross-referencing capability
of OnBase then enables the agents to simply
double-click on a specific line item in
the aging report and immediately retrieve
the corresponding statement or invoice.
Through the OnBase Host Application Enabler
module, which combines this same cross-referencing
capability with screen-scraping technology,
agents also have the ability to directly
access documents by double-clicking on
fields in the accounting system.
The solution also provides quality checks
to ensure that all signed invoices are
present and accounted for in the OnBase
system. The accounting system generates
an output report that lists all of the
invoices delivered in a given day, which
is in turn processed into OnBase as COLD
data. At day's end, the OnBase Exception
Reports module identifies any invoices
that are not yet present in the OnBase
system.
Client Benefit
Because OnBase offers more out-of-the-box
functionality than any other integrated
document management system, the company's
solution was implemented without any custom
coding. The complete solution was put
into production 35 days from the start
of implementation. Fifty professionals
within the merging companies now have
access to the OnBase system, providing
them a complete picture of the customer
transactions.
Prior to the merger the company staffed
4 people to file and manage less than
7,000 signed invoices per day. Today,
the combined company relies on a staff
of 3 to process 15,000 invoices per day.
The redeployment of personnel and the
increased turnover in receivables provided
new company with a 100% return on investment
in less than one year.
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