Punctuality Pays
Continued
“Other vendors came in and told us, 'Look, have all your suppliers put this information in exactly the same place, and that will make reading it a lot easier,’” says Searls. “At first blush, that advice sounds simple, but when you have thousands of suppliers, some of which are very large companies, trying to get them to build a customized invoice to meet our specifications is simply out of the question. Instead, we integrated Brainware into our own systems, and within a matter of weeks, we were able to save the cost of six or seven full-time data entry clerks, so almost immediately we realized a great return on our investment.”
Savings in Duplicate
The impact of automating accounts payable goes way beyond timely payment, says Searls, because the company now has the ability to identify invoice issues more quickly and has eliminated the cost of correcting its own mistakes.
“Before, we were paying a company to come in, conduct an audit, help us find where we had made duplicate invoice payments, and then help us recover that money for a portion of the recovery,” he says. “Ever since we’ve put Brainware in place, they say there’s so little duplicate payment, it’s not worth their time. Our processes are now so tight that they’d rather go work for someone else.”
Connecting the dots between Brainware Distiller and JD Edwards World has translated into significant hard dollar savings for Alltel, and Searls couldn’t be happier.
“Of course, every business is looking for a big return on an IT investment project, but the reality is that it sometimes takes a year or 18 months, and people are left looking at all kinds of murky financial information that will hopefully prove that it was a good investment,” Searls explains. “You have to appreciate that these are millions of dollars of prompt payment discounts we’re achieving. At the outset, the old manual invoice handling process was so cumbersome that I would estimate we were missing out on early payment discounts close to 60 percent of the time. Today we probably miss out on early payment discounts less than 1 percent of the time, which amounts to a savings that is well north of $15 million annually.”
Budget Wise
“The good news for the capture and image management market is that these types of IT projects carry a very defensible ROI [return on investment], which makes them very compelling,” says IDC’s Webster. IT staff members can develop strategies for implementing these types of solutions that allow IT to provide business managers with a clear and substantive proposal that solves a vexing—but common—enterprise problem. The even better news for Alltel is that its ROI far exceeded
management expectations.
“Overall, it’s a pretty simple story,” concludes Searls. “Brainware Distiller is a rifle-shot application. It did what it was supposed to do. We were very frustrated that we weren’t managing the supply end of our cash stream to our satisfaction. It was a really problematic situation that was getting close to being a board-level concern. By allowing us to connect the dots between Oracle and Brainware, it quickly became a nonevent, and it freed up some of our employees for more-strategic tasks. I only wish that we’d done it sooner.”
For More Information
Oracle’s JD Edwards World
Brainware
Marta Bright is a senior editor with Oracle Publishing and a frequent
contributor to
Profit.
