Automating your company’s business requirements has evolved way beyond basic scanning and indexing of documents. Organizations must now maximize their automation, routing, indexing, and sending of documents into workflows. Intelligent ECM solutions that maximize automation during the first steps are now able to identify, extract, classify, route and index with basically no manual intervention. In addition, all document types and forms are able to be passed through the system so all your content can be managed electronically without the need for other programs. Combining these steps can accelerate your business processes and dramatically reduce operational costs like never before.
Another example of maximizing the Automation Process is reducing the difficulty of routing non-PO invoices in a large company. Finding the correct person or department may be challenging based on the information that is provided on the invoice. Even more challenging is the fact that many large companies are moving to a Shared Services model, and the number of invoices any given Accounts Payable (AP) person will see may increase dramatically. Some tricks we have implemented to help solve this problem include simple tasks like having the vendors include a routing code on the invoice (2nd or 3rd line of the address box can be used). This helps to narrow down the location its being routed to for the AP person. Another technique is to have the system doing the indexing remember the routing code or preference from the last time. This will speed up routing of future invoices once the initial value has been set. Of course, the challenge comes when a single vendor sends invoices to multiple Organizational Units within a given company. Then similar techniques can be used as above. Lookups based on clues provided on the invoice, such as looking up the “Buyer” and referencing their name to the correct OU and Department for approval.
In a perfect world, Vendors would submit invoices with a barcode on them, which contained the OU, Buyer and Department information. While dreaming about it, how about we add the invoice number, vendor number, invoice date, and instead of printing how about just send it via E-invoice? But that’s a whole different story will tackle at a later time..
Published By: Paul Pitts
All Star Software Systems LLC
