Punctuality Pays

Continued

“‘State of the art’ used to be scanning an image and being able to pull off the invoice number,” says Webster. “Today these systems are much more sophisticated, and they can pull off line items and automatically match the information with data from the ERP system.”

Webster has observed that many people either don’t know or don’t really believe that these types of technologies can make such a dramatic difference in their company’s business operations.

“They often seem to worry that the potential automation of an existing business process equates to massive upheaval or disruption,” Webster says. “The truth is, you can adopt these technologies without disruption.”

Busting the Chaos Theory

The trap Webster describes is precisely what was taking place at Alltel. With the company’s shift to a 2/10 net 45 payment policy came a hard reality check for Searls, who did not have a clear picture of how chaotic the invoice-handling situation had become. Suppliers were sometimes paid multiple times for the same invoice, and confusion caused by the sheer volume of paper resulted in invoices being mixed in with other documents.

“It wasn’t an appropriate way to conduct business,” says Searls. “You have a room filled with people, it’s hot, there are pieces of paper and letters and envelopes stacked everywhere, and everybody’s uncomfortable and irritated, but they’re doing the best they can to move the invoices through a tedious manual process.” On any given day, the backlog hovered at around 2,000 invoices as workers keyed in thousands of invoices from more than 5,500 different vendors.

Fuzzy Logic, Clear Returns

“When the issues around effectively managing vendor discounts came to light, we had to really focus our line of reasoning on how we could become more efficient,” says Chad Necessary, director of corporate systems at Alltel. Attaining significant improvements in its accounts payable system would require Alltel to align the JD Edwards World system with an invoice processing solution offering high-value, high-transaction business intelligence (BI) capabilities that could help Alltel with the challenge of tracking thousands of unique vendor invoices.

“Our premise for finding a suitable solution provider focused on automation,” Searls adds. “The emphasis was on how fast we could get there.” The solution that Alltel chose, Brainware Distiller, offered several distinct advantages.

First, it fit cleanly into Alltel’s existing Oracle architecture by allowing scanned information to be passed into the JD Edwards World workflow for exception handling. Second, Brainware Distiller is capable of learning by example, which means that the solution is able to recognize many document variations without templates, rules, or excessive scripting. Third, Brainware Distiller incorporates a very specific type of fuzzy search and validation logic into its architecture.

This proprietary technology helps overcome the common challenges introduced by poor-quality optical character recognition results. It also makes it possible for Alltel’s system to automatically recognize and extract specific data fields and invoice line items and then compare them with other datasources such as the vendor master files, a purchase order database, or a general ledger file such as those that exist within a company’s current chart of accounts.

Making the Right Choice

Addressing a diverse set of invoices is important for Alltel, Searls notes, because it allows PO numbers, invoice numbers, total dollar amounts, and even line item descriptions to be parsed out to quickly display key information about any single invoice from any of the company’s several thousand vendors. High-speed scanning, data capture, and BI-based recognition of these unique identifiers, regardless of where they’re located on a vendor’s invoice, produce significant cost savings by eliminating the need for manual data entry.