Electronic Document Management
Case Studies:
Candle company starts in Accounts Payables, moves to Customer Service.
The Candle-lite Company celebrates 160 years of candle making this year. The Company roots go back to 1840, when an English settler by the name of Thomas Emery went door to door selling candles and other items. Today, Candles and Glass are a 400 million dollar business for this very successful division of Lancaster Colony Corp. NYSE(LANC). With demanding customers like Wal-Mart, Target Stores and K-Mart, keeping costs down and efficiency up is an absolute must for continued profitability and growth. Even with "state of the art" computer systems and networks, paper files to support a centralized Accounts Payable operation writing 10,000 checks a month were growing at an alarming rate. Keeping track of over a million documents a year that relate to customer sales orders was no small task either.
With a central office and remote factories managing paperwork is a complex task. Candle-lite customers are some of the world's largest retailers and are very demanding and quick to take a deduction or credit. Effective management of the deduction process is a critical component to profitability. Supporting all of this activity took over two hundred filing cabinets and the attendant space not to mention the people and labor cost to maintain files
In 1999, after studying the problem and looking at a variety of systems, the management of Candle-lite decided to initiate a pilot system in the Accounts Payable department. The plan was to introduce Docuvision technology in a single department with a view towards expanding its use if proven successful. Another goal was to design the system to be used by existing staff and to not increase headcount. In fact, a headcount reduction was a desired goal along with the redistribution of some of the work out to the remote plants.
Docuvision helped Candle-lite accomplish these goals by installing a system which allows the vendor invoices to be scanned into "electronic" in-baskets. From here, the Invoices are then vouchered into the legacy HP 3000 financials. In a single step, the voucher information is simultaneously entered into the A/ P system and the very same information is "scraped" from the A/P screen and attached to the scanned invoice. The invoice is then electronically filed and no further effort is required. Anyone in accounting can now look up accounting or vendor information at their PC without leaving their desk. With this success behind them, the Customer service and sales department was next.
Docuvision did additional surveys before beginning the task. The surveys revealed that most of the paper going into files was being created by existing systems. By capturing the electronic output of those systems directly and creating electronic folders for documents to reside, significant labor savings could be realized not to mention copies and forms. The electronic folder became the location for all documents related to a sales order transaction. Because this information is now available to anyone at his or her PC, look-ups take a few seconds and the task of filing over a million pieces of paper annually is eliminated. Software was developed to monitor the cash receipts process for a deduction from invoice amount.
If a deduction is taken, a report is created and a copy of the report is put into an electronic folder with all the related documents. This improvement helps the adjustments and returns staffs spend more time resolving problems instead of filing and making copies. All the documents necessary to begin the process can be called up on screen with a few keystrokes and faxed instantly to speed the resolution of the problem.