Challenge
When tedious manual processes began impacting productivity, the accounting team at ASSA ABLOY knew it was time for a change. The organization was using Oracle Imaging and Process Management (Oracle I/PM) for accounts processing but with no interface for its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (JDE) platform, the team spent a significant amount of time manually inputting invoices into Oracle I/PM. The manual process included scanning all invoices, emails and associated documents individually to attach them to the appropriate account. The Accounts Payable (AP) workflow had become a time-consuming, redundant, and costly process.
When ASSA ABLOY’s accounting team learned the Oracle I/ PM system was going to be phased out, it immediately began looking for a new solution that would better suit its needs. In addition, ASSA ABLOY decided to consolidate all AP duties to a single location and planned to transition all acquired group companies to JDE. As the accounting team compared a number of competing AP solutions, it found that Bottomline’s solution seamlessly integrated with JDE and offered the workflow features that ASSA ABLOY required.
“We would not have been able to improve our productivity with our old resources and it would not be possible without the Bottomline solution. At the end of the day, we made a very good choice.”
– Dan Relihan, Director of Enterprise Applications and leader of Business Intelligence
The Solution
The new AP solution needed to be user friendly, easy to integrate into the existing ERP system and provide a level of workflow optimization that would support the team as it printed and scanned thousands of documents per day. Transform AP for Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offered all of these benefits along with an improved user interface.
The product offered significant improvements, including the ability to process more invoices in less time compared to the previous system. Transform AP had the same user interface as JDE, significantly reducing the team’s learning curve. The team was also particularly pleased with the sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) that captured and validated invoice information and intelligently “fingerprinted” invoices on the fly to continuously improve recognition results.
The Results
With Transform AP, ASSA ABLOY no longer has to rely on cumbersome manual processes. Invoices are now automatically entered into JD Edwards after scanning and remote workers can easily access an image to review invoice information. “The solution posed no technical challenges to implementation, and proved to be an easy to install, user-friendly system that simplifies the entire invoice process,” said Relihan.
Transform AP allows the team to easily collate and access all accountrelated documents through the system. These are uploaded during the coding and approval stage and are easy to attach in the system, so staff members no longer have to spend time searching for and attaching documents individually. The “paper clip” attachment feature helps reduce confusion, ambiguity and questions about charges and prints copies of invoices to support charges.
Transform AP was configured so ASSA ABLOY could benefit from an easy-to-use system that improved productivity. In addition to the easy implementation and transition, the Bottomline support team continues to collaborate with the accounting team to quickly resolve issues if they arise and helping whenever necessary.
In fact, the solution is so effective that ASSA ABLOY eventually plans to implement Transform AP in at least 30 to 40 of its group companies, expecting similar improvements to productivity and workflow.
