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American Solutions for Business had become heavily focused on customer acquisition and laid out a strategic goal of double-digit sales increases with no new payroll additions. They were also acquiring multiple lower-volume distributors who were accustomed to achieving quick turnarounds for their customers. Their system for processing and paying out invoices, however, was manual, laborious and very, very slow.
The team who managed the order process after the point of sale and facilitated back-end accounting received invoices via fax, email and mail. From there, each document required 12 touches from time of receipt to filing, with 8-10 individuals physically routing it from department to department. The result? It took five days for a single document to be processed.
The amount of time lost in simply routing paperwork was staggering considering they received anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 invoices each week. Additionally, the chance of introducing errors was exponential. With so many people handling each of the nearly 1.6 million documents per year, the team constantly found themselves asking, “Where is that invoice?” Physical storage was also a huge liability, and the company had to maintain excess floor space for all the filing cabinets.
They knew that to achieve their ambitious goals, they would need to streamline their operational processes and increase their document processing speed – a lot.
Any document management solution would need to handle large volumes of invoice processing with ease and be able to accommodate a myriad of different templates. Otherwise, with 7,000 suppliers, it would take multiple employees endless amounts of time to input data with point and click. Integration with their existing M-Files document management system and with Oracle PeopleSoft ERP was a non-negotiable.
Additionally, with their busy, fast-paced business, the American Solutions or Business team didn’t have the time to chase down tons of service providers to get their questions answered and needs addressed. They wanted to have one person to call to get something fixed.
PSIGEN PSIcapture
M-Files
Miriah Cassidy, Senior Director of Sales Support, found PSIGEN through a trusted partner and value-added reseller MARCO. “With a lot of the competitor demos, we only got to see the bells and whistles,” Cassidy said. “The PSIGEN demo was a much more accurate representation of what we would eventually use—and we were impressed.”
PSIGEN easily integrated with both their existing M-Files document management system and ERP. Additionally, the robust template capabilities meant they could configure—and automate—unique data capture for each of their suppliers.
Two people from Cassidy’s team were assigned to exclusively work on the PSIGEN implementation and to set up all the templates prior to go-live. To start, they set up the main 500 vendors and waited to see how it would go. “We expected to get it in place and work out bumps along the way but within the first two weeks, ten people who had been doing the job had all been transitioned into new roles. It was amazing.”
“What we received was exactly what we were shown and there were no surprises. And thanks to knowing what to expect, the implementation went perfectly.”
Today, American Solutions for Business is still processing the same amount of documents per day, but they are only manually touching about 50 of those. Of the documents being processed, there is a 98.5% accuracy rate, a vast improvement over manual paper processing. In terms of efficiency and cost savings, Cassidy says that the PSIGEN system paid for itself in just 14 days. Other gained efficiencies include a three-day reduction in order processing time and a near elimination of misplaced invoices.
American Solutions for Business also enjoys stronger customer relationships, offering faster supplier turnaround times and a 50% reduction in their prompt payment discount. The partnership with suppliers has reduced paper USPS invoice receipts from 50% of overall invoicing to under 5% – which saves the company and the supplier money. Time-wise, customer invoicing and sales associate order processing are both three days faster.
Thanks in part to streamlining order processing with PSIGEN, American Solutions for Business achieved double-digit growth in 2016 and is on track to maintain steady increases for the coming year as well. They were able to keep up with the pace of company growth without adding any new positions as intended.
Perhaps best of all, they managed to avoid eliminating any existing positions. All of the invoice processing staff members were promoted to higher roles in the company and some have even been further promoted since those initial role changes.
American Solutions for Business is already looking forward to expanding the partnership with PSIGEN and has its sights set on doing OCR and capture for POs and sales orders that are currently being manually entered into the ERP.
“If I had any advice for other companies considering PSIGEN, it would be to consider what it can do beyond your original intent. After implementing and experiencing the solutions, the first thing we asked was, ‘What can we improve next?’ and quickly discovered that the best thing about PSIGEN is the incredible set of advanced features.”
