Summary
A world-class manufacturer and provider of subsea technologies and services connecting the global offshore energy industry (the “Manufacturer”) provide innovative technologies that enable vital control and power delivery for both the oil and gas and renewable energy sectors. The company’s sales, engineering design, planning, manufacturing and QA departments work together on many projects. However, the globally dispersed teams needed access to project documents and critical business information delivered via a single source. To enable access and clarity across the enterprise, the Manufacturer implemented an automatic categorization and metadata tool that would streamline capture processes. This allows them to better utilize their investment in SharePoint as the main repository, as well as boost adoption.
Challenge
One of the main challenges the Manufacturer faced was an enormous volume of invoices to process manually. The finance department was not coping well with the increasing volume – 15,000 invoices a year – which led to late payments. Additionally, some invoices were misplaced, lost or duplicated in the manual approval process. Although they were running a SharePoint intranet, the remote departments were not collaborating on a shared repository. The company’s original document management platform was designed as a monolithic solution that had become too brittle and complex to meet current business expectations. Moreover, their usage of SharePoint was alarmingly low, as there was no single point of entry for all business applications.
Strategy
The Manufacturer worked with Ephesoft UK solutions provider IONIT to implement Ephesoft Transact Smart Capture to help streamline the organization and classification of documents within their SharePoint environment. Using the solution, the Manufacturer can quickly onboard documents through automated classification, extraction, and delivery of the documents (in paper and electronic formats) and associated data directly into the SharePoint workflow and approval process.
The Ephesoft product helped them immediately, particularly with invoice processing. For example, most of the Manufacturer’s computer-generated invoices are automatically captured and extracted using OCR – including almost all the required elements, 23 data fields. As part of the solution, automated database lookup queries assist in extracting metadata from the invoices and associated documents. In rare cases of illegible documents, the software finds the location of key fields and presents them to an operator for fast and efficient manual assisted data entry.
It’s very intuitive and easy to configure, and since less training required, our customers love it. When needed Ephesoft offers a very proactive and helpful support team.
Anshuman Nayak (Lead Systems Consultant , IONIT)
Results
The Manufacturer’s invoice processing solution helped enable timely payments from customers and ensured attractive economics. Since implementing Ephesoft, they were able to manage a 40% increase in invoices – from 15,000 to 21,000 invoices – with no issues. They were able to streamline project document control and project-based collaboration by integrating the workflow of sales, design, planning, manufacturing and QA departments. With a robust document approval process, the Manufacturer has confidence that organizational documents are dealt with via a transparent approval chain before being published/updated/deleted. This ensures availability of correct document versions during the entire project lifecycle with the support of an audit trail for all key documents.
About 250 employees are currently utilizing the solution. The Manufacturer was able to immediately see the advantages of remote capture. They have realized cheaper distribution, faster access to the documents, reduced shipping costs and shorter processing times with fewer records lost, duplicated or misplaced.
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