Tag Archive for: Enterprise Content Management

Who Should You Include in the Enterprise Software Selection Process?

In an increasingly technology-dependent world, change is always on the horizon. Your organization has spent years, possibly even decades, working diligently to achieve success. Your people, processes, and customers are a direct result of your organization’s ability to adapt and thrive, but when the playing field is no longer level, it’s time to innovate before you dissipate.

For enterprise-level businesses, keeping pace with innovation is a constant challenge. By ignoring innovation, you only prolong the inevitable. By making rash, uninformed decisions, you shift your company in a dangerous trajectory. The most obvious example is enterprise software, including:

While these technologies have the potential to give your company a distinct competitive advantage in terms of security, accuracy, speed, and cost, finding the right solution takes input and collaboration from a variety of key decision-makers. Who should you include in the enterprise software selection process? It depends on your business, core technology, and objectives. This article provides several insightful tips to help you form a team that will lead you towards the best enterprise software solution to address your specific needs.

Consider This Before You Begin the Enterprise Software Selection Process

It takes time to find the ideal enterprise software vendor for your business. The vetting process can be long and costly, which means establishing clear objectives early on is essential for reducing the cost of your enterprise software project. The vetting process typically involves between three and ten vendors, which means the more vendors you reach out to, the longer and more costly your selection process will be.

Internally, your organization needs to set rules for performing due diligence, vetting qualifications, rejecting poor matches, and, ultimately, defining its shortlist. You don’t want ten vendors on your shortlist. Two is ideal. Three is manageable. But anything beyond that can make the final selection process harder than it needs to be.

Calculating the Cost of Selection

The enterprise software selection process can take anywhere from three to eighteen months. The faster you can pull together your team and start vetting vendors, the smaller the hit to your bottom line. According to the Supply Chain Coalition, it takes “up to 300 hours/person by a team of up to 20 key individuals” to select enterprise software for your business. But with the right team (and helpful vendors), you can cut down this number drastically. They estimate that the cost of selection, on average, equals $900,000. Here’s how they reached this number:

Company burdened rate ($150/hour) x 300 hours x 20 employees = $900,000

And that’s before you get any benefit from your new system. Over the last decade, we’ve implemented enterprise software, such as ECM, AP Automation, and Sales Order Automation, for hundreds of customers. We’ve discussed this statistic with them, and, frankly, the cost of selection has never been calculated anywhere near this figure.

Certainly, this figure could account for the worst-case scenario, but we believe that transparent collaboration is the key to accelerating your project and reducing the cost to implement. You want to recoup your investment as quickly as possible, which is why we’ve made it our goal to help businesses generate 100 percent ROI within the first 12-18 months of implementation.

If you want to learn more about how companies like yours have handled the selection process, our team is happy to walk you through some case studies from past customers that are already using IntelliChief. Now, it’s time to answer the titular question:

Who Should You Include in the Enterprise Software Selection Process?

CEO

The term “CEO” is used rather loosely these days. Investopedia defines a Chief Executive Officer as “the highest-ranking executive in a company, whose primary responsibilities include making major corporate decisions, managing the overall operations and resources of a company, acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors (the board) and corporate operations and being the public face of the company.”

In most companies, high-dollar investments must typically be approved by the CEO. We recommend getting project approval from your company’s CEO before you start the selection process, then looping back around in the later stages of your search to update them accordingly and provide additional knowledge. You must provide a clear rationale for the project, the estimated cost to implement, and the projected time it will take to recoup the investment as well as future projections for cost savings and operational improvements.

It’s unlikely the CEO will be involved throughout every step of the selection process, but they need to be convinced if you want them to provide the proverbial thumbs up or down at important junctions along the way.

Other C-Level Executives to Include in the Selection Process

In addition to the CEO, you should also consider the following C-level executives when shopping for enterprise software.

CFO

As the head of your Finance department, the Chief Financial Officer oversees financial operations, budgeting, and financial reporting. When shopping enterprise software, the CFO is a powerful ally that can help you convey value to the CEO and accelerate the project timeline. Among the members of your team, they also have the most to gain. Enterprise software is highly effective for reducing costs across all areas of your organization — a benefit your CFO will recognize immediately.

CIO

The Chief Information Officer takes the lead in matters concerning information technology (IT) and implementation. This technical role is responsible for ensuring the smooth rollout of any new technologies in your organization. However, their job doesn’t exclusively involve overseeing hardware, software, and data for the C-suite. They are also tasked with researching potentially lucrative technologies, building use cases, and providing value propositions. In most implementations, the CIO plays a prominent role because they combine the technical know-how of IT with the high-level insights of the C-suite.

Recommended Solutions: Enterprise Content Management, Accounts Payable Automation, Sales Order Automation, HR Automation, and Document Retention.

President/Vice President

Sometimes, the CEO is too busy or unavailable to greenlight a new project. As the second in command, the President (or even the Vice President) can be an effective partner in navigating the software selection process. Similar to the CEO, they have high-level knowledge of your organization’s needs and a strong understanding of what must be done to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Some companies have a single President, while others have several Vice Presidents overseeing various departments. Determining who you should turn to (or who should take it upon themselves to initiate an enterprise software project) depends on the hierarchical structure of your company. While these positions most commonly deal with logistics, business operations, and policy, they can also serve as the glue between various managers and decision-makers. They can help you determine which type of enterprise software will have the most significant benefit by examining operational weaknesses, inefficient business processes, and detrimental cost centers.

Recommended Solutions: Enterprise Content Management, Process Automation, and Platform Services.

Operations Manager

The operations manager, also referred to as chief operating officer or COO, oversees various high-level HR-related duties, including:

  • Scouting and attracting qualified talent
  • Establishing rigorous training standards
  • Refining the hiring process
  • Analyzing organization processes and recommending improvements
  • Enhancing workforce quality, productivity, and efficiency

Implementing enterprise software, whether in Human Resources or any other department in your organization, will affect your employees directly by altering the way they perform their jobs. While these changes are almost always positive, they are changes, and employees often resist changes to the status quo.

The operations manager can help make this transition a smooth experience for everyone by providing their expertise and representing the sentiment of current and future employees. They can also refine hiring processes to account for new technology.

Whether your organization is looking to automate HR-based processes or increase efficiency across multiple departments, the operations manager can provide an employee-first perspective to ensure that your enterprise software implementation makes work more enjoyable for all.

Recommended Solutions: HR Automation, Process Automation, and Document Retention.

Production Manager

The production manager plays a vital role in any organization that creates and distributes products. From scheduling to budgeting and meeting deadlines, the production manager has an inside track on the functions that allow your business to satisfy commitments to customers.

How does enterprise software factor into your production line? This is an important question that you will need to address at some point during the enterprise software selection process. The production manager can help you answer it.

For example, if you are shopping for Sales Order Automation, your production manager can help you understand the effect faster order processing and clearance will have on your production needs. When you get paid faster, you can complete orders more quickly, but what effect does that have on production? There’s a good chance that you will need to produce more products to satisfy faster order turnaround.

Recommended Solutions: Sales Order Automation, Document Management for Manufacturing, and Accounts Receivable Automation.

Warehouse/Shipping Manager

According to TalentLyft, warehouse managers (or shipping managers) are responsible for an array of important tasks, including “packing, verifying content for shipping, receiving packages, [and] ordering supplies.”

However, today’s shipping managers are also responsible for using software to optimize distribution processes, managing documents (i.e., advanced shipping notices, pick slips, bills of lading, and more), and directing packages from start to finish.

Depending on your enterprise software solution, any number of these processes can be streamlined or automated, which means including your warehouse/shipping manager in your search will help you identify a solution that meets your requirements from both operations and cost savings perspectives.

Recommended Solutions: Sales Order Automation, Document Management for Distribution, Document Management for Manufacturing, Enterprise Analytics, and Workflow Automation.

Accounts Payable Manager

One of the fastest ways to recoup your initial investment when purchasing enterprise software is by starting in Accounts Payable. If your organization is still performing AP tasks “the old way,” it will benefit immensely from Accounts Payable Automation.

AP Automation helps businesses reduce invoice processing costs, eliminate late fees, and capture more early payment discounts. It’s the perfect starting point for any enterprise software implementation because it demonstrates lightning-fast ROI and significant operational improvements. Once you see the benefits of AP Automation, it’s only a matter of time before you expand your solution to other departments — if your solution is designed for the enterprise and can be utilized for multiple applications.

Your Accounts Payable Manager is an integral part of any software selection committee, providing the technical expertise of your specific AP processes that will allow your vendor to automate your processes in a way that matches the way you currently do business (while refining these processes and making them faster and more efficient).

When implemented by a proven vendor with a penchant for AP Automation success, your AP manager’s job becomes much easier. AP Automation streamlines invoice processing, voucher creation, records management, and reporting.

Recommended Solutions: Accounts Payable Automation and Enterprise Content Management.

Line Supervisors

Line supervisors oversee work performed on the line, manage schedules, and monitor quality control. Career Trend describes line supervisors as the “eyes and ears on the line during operations.”

Although line supervisors do not perform high-level management tasks, they can provide the most granular insights into your specific processes. When mapping processes for process automation, talking to your line supervisors can ensure that nothing falls between the cracks. This is important because even minor tasks can throw off your automation implementation when unaccounted for. Plus, they will have a more complete understanding of undocumented tasks and tribal knowledge associated with the particular line they are supervising.

Recommended Solutions: Determined on a case-by-case basis.

Outside Consultants

Forming a selection committee with members of your organization is a surefire way to ensure that your selection process is productive; however, there’s no denying the fact that the solution you need may not be one that you’re familiar with. For this reason, many businesses seek assistance from consultants outside of their organization. Outside consultants are helpful for a number of reasons, including:

  • Experience dealing with customers that match your business profile
  • Expertise on the subject of enterprise software as well as the various types of software that can be utilized to solve your unique problems
  • Connections within the enterprise software industry for potential discounts
  • Taking point during the selection process to weed out vendors that are only looking for a sale
  • Impartiality during the selection process
  • Familiarity with your existing core technology
  • Industry-specific or ERP-specific knowledge

Recommended Solutions: Determined on a case-by-case basis.

Account Executives (From Vendor Shortlist)

Once you have created a shortlist of vendors you are interested in discussing your project with, establish a point of contact at each solution provider. Are they trying to sell you their product? Yes. But in order to do so, they need to answer all of your questions and gain your confidence. In other words, you have all the leverage during the selection process.

Here’s an insider tip: the vendors on your shortlist are expecting you to be in talks with other providers. Use this to your advantage. Compare and contrast their offerings against the others on your shortlist. It’s a good idea to be transparent about the other vendors you’re considering as this can help you discover which ones are being substantive with their claims and which ones are only blowing smoke.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide for yourself which vendor has the right solution for your business, but it’s impossible to distinguish between the good and the bad without talking directly to an account executive from each contender. Here are some questions to consider as you talk to vendors:

  • Does the solution integrate with my ERP system?
  • If so, does the integration provide real-time updates?
  • Will I have to change my business processes?
  • Is the interface user-friendly?
  • What features are available to improve straight-through processing rates?
  • Does the solution permit remote work capabilities?
  • Is the solution able to be audited?
  • Does the solution feature analytics for reporting?
  • Can the solution be expanded to other departments?
  • What else is included beyond the software itself?
  • How is training handled?
  • What makes this solution more suitable than the others on my shortlist?
  • How can we verify ROI before making a significant investment?

By asking these questions (and others), you can start to whittle down your shortlist from the recommended three vendors to your chosen enterprise software solution.

Recommended Solutions: Determined on a case-by-case basis.

You’ve Formed Your Enterprise Software Selection Committee. What’s Next?

Now that you’ve assembled a diverse, knowledgeable team of experts from inside and (potentially) outside your business, it’s time to get to work. The longer you wait to implement a game-changing solution, the higher the opportunity cost of remaining the same. Businesses often fail to recognize the detrimental effect of existing inefficiencies that have been baked into your processes for years or decades — but this is the very reason why waiting to get started only hurts your bottom line. Fortunately, there are several ways to get started, including:

For more information on identifying the right enterprise software solution for your unique business needs, contact us today. Our experts are standing by to help your break down your goals and requirements. One quick chat with an expert can potentially save you hours of wasted time by ensuring that your search is pointed in the right direction from the start.

 

How to Conduct a Remote Audit

Most audits are conducted on-site, not because it’s practical or convenient but because it has become customary over the years. Since the dawn of accounting, in-person audits have become a facet of doing business that we begrudgingly accept. In fact, most companies conduct internal audits to be 100 percent certain that they are maintaining compliance with SOX, SOC 1 (Type 1 and Type 2), SEC Rule 17, and other external and internal compliance regulations.  Although it’s worked reasonably well, technology now permits businesses to conduct audits remotely, which means greater flexibility for business, reduced auditing costs, and greater peace of mind. But how do you conduct a remote audit? And how do you know if your business is prepared for remote accounting audits?

What Technology Do You Need to Conduct a Remote Audit?

For companies interested in conducting remote audits, it is important to recognize that technology is the key to unlock this useful capability. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems that combine Document Management, Mobile Content Management, and Workflow Automation are ideal for driving remote auditing capabilities. ECM facilitates the digitization of all enterprise documents, which leads to expanded options for dealing with documentation both in and out of the office. Here’s how it works:

  • Enterprise Content Management: a single, integrated platform that connects with your existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and provides the framework for the various technologies that make remote audits possible.
  • Document Management: technology that digitizes documentation and provides a secure, centralized repository from which all documents can be accessed, reviewed, and processed by approved users.
  • Mobile Content Management: technology that facilitates access to your organization’s digital repository by providing remote access to mobile devices. Mobile Content Management not only allows users in the field to process documents without returning to the office but also permits auditors to collect and review documents remotely for faster, less expensive audits.
  • Workflow Automation: advanced automation that leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to streamline workflows and automate processes from start to finish. It also helps auditors find what they’re looking for more quickly and allows organizations to automate records retention using RPA-powered policies.

Are Remote Audits Right for Your Business?

ECM permits remote access, allowing approved users to source documentation from throughout your organization. It also allows businesses to create and control access by auditors using the same ECM system. In other words, you can provide temporary credentials to an auditor, allowing them to access the documents they require (and only those documents). This capability is ideal for enterprises that handle a large volume of documentation, such as invoices, sales orders, packing slips, and even onboarding forms.

The other benefit of using an ECM system to perform a remote audit is that it doesn’t limit your businesses to the types of audits it can perform. ECM is designed to be utilized across the enterprise in Accounting, Finance, Legal, Customer Service, Human Resources, and more. These departments often process thousands of documents per month, which creates a significant burden for your auditor if they are tasked with finding documents manually.

What Are the Benefits of Remote Auditing Technologies?

There are many benefits for businesses that conduct remote audits. First and foremost, it makes the process of undergoing an audit simple. Your company provides their auditing firm with an ECM user account with approved permissions that dictate what the auditor can access. Related transactional documentation is also readily available as long as your ECM system supports digital paper trails. Leading ECM systems operate as a “single source of truth” or SSOT. That means your auditor can find everything they need within a single, integrated system. Other benefits include:

  • Provides a central repository with robust search capabilities based on any recorded criteria (i.e., invoice #, vendor name, item #, date, logo, and more)
  • Supports centralized access from decentralized locations
  • Reduces audit fees
  • Accelerates audit completion
  • Captures all transactional documentation using automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, ensuring that no documents are ever lost, damaged, or destroyed
  • Organizes documentation contiguously.
  • Validates and updates information in real-times
  • Improves business intelligence with robust analytics capabilities
  • Tracks auditor activity and progress
  • Guides auditors using plain-text notifications
  • Generates reports that are useful for both your organization and the auditor
  • Allows your organization’s decision-makers to easily review audit results whether conducted internally or externally
  • Facilitates customizable, scalable dashboards that deliver convenient self-service analytics reporting for each audit
  • Conducts multiple audits simultaneously from disparate locations

What Happens After You Embrace Remote Auditing Technologies?

Once you start to conduct audits remotely, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of on-site meetings. These will continue to occur, although much less frequently, and these interactions should be streamlined due to the added organization and file access provided by your ECM system. Collaboration with auditors and your department heads will be accelerated for faster resolutions. The company-firm relationship will remain strong, and perhaps even improve thanks to the added efficiency of ECM.

It’s still important to meet face-to-face every now and then, but in an increasingly digital world, it’s not unrealistic to believe that these types of interactions are already being phased out in favor of meetings conducted over Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. Additionally, auditors are freed from long stints as a company’s on-site guest — something all parties admittedly appreciate. Your auditors will no longer need to travel, billable hours will be reduced, and you will gain greater control over the cost of audits. Your company will, ultimately, avoid audit projects exceeding projected timetables and budgets, resulting in mutual satisfaction in your fiscal relationships.

Needless to say, remote auditing is highly advantageous for all parties. ECM provides the platform to keep it convenient and cost-effective, allowing your organization to focus less on checks and balances and more on future growth.

To learn more about how remote audits can help your business save money, preserve time, and maintain compliance, contact IntelliChief today.

How to Improve Asset Turnover Ratio With Sales Order Processing Automation

Getting more products out the door more quickly lets you maximize your assets. It’s a universal objective shared by everyone from Finance to Operations — and it’s your competitors’ objective, too. Everyone knows you need to spend money to make money, but determining exactly how much revenue each asset generates can be a challenge. Fortunately, there’s a formula to help you figure out exactly that. It’s known as the asset turnover ratio.

What Is the Asset Turnover Ratio?

Have you ever seen this formula before?

Asset Turnover Ratio = Sales or Revenues / Total Assets.

According to the Corporate Finance Institute, “The asset turnover ratio, also known as the total asset turnover ratio, measures the efficiency with which a company uses its assets to produce sales.”

The higher the asset turnover ratio, the better your company is performing. Higher ratios mean that you’re generating more revenue per asset, which is a key indicator of where your organization stands against its competitors. If you want to understand how every dollar in total assets equates to sales, this formula will reveal the answer.

So how can you maximize your assets? The answer is simple: Sales Order Processing Automation.

Improve Your Asset Turnover Ratio With Sales Order Processing Automation

Sales Order Processing Automation is one of the most effective tools for maximizing assets. By accelerating your fulfillment process and streamlining logistics, your company can increase revenues and reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). DSO has a dramatic impact on this figure, which is why it should be one of your key KPIs, especially if you are utilizing Sales Order Processing Automation.

With automation, your organization can streamline and automate business processes to make them faster and less prone to error. In fact, some companies have been able to reduce order processing times by as much as 80 percent.

80%

Reduction in Order Processing Time

 

Why is this important? Faster turnaround means buyers get their bills in a fifth of the time, starting the contractual payment clocks faster and accelerating revenue.

Getting Started With Sales Order Processing Automation

Now that you’ve decided that you want to improve your organization’s asset turnover ratio, it’s time to plan for your automation implementation. Before you start to worry, here’s some good news — it doesn’t take much to optimize your order processing workflow.

Our proven sales order processing system integrates directly with your ERP, making IntelliChief a safe and reliable component of your digital infrastructure. IntelliChief helps you bill your customers faster and track the status of every payment. It electronically captures all your documentation at its point of origin, then indexes the relevant content and organizes it in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. It even communicates with your ERP or line of business system, synchronizing your databases and updating your customer activity records in real-time.

So, what does this mean for your business? It means you have the opportunity to deploy cash assets into capital investments. You can enhance everything from sales and customer service to production and fulfillment.

Interested in learning more? Read our Sales Order Processing Automation white paper or contact us.

White Paper

 

Improving Collaboration in a Multi-Location Office

That deadline is tomorrow? Wait — John was supposed to be working on that!

Nothing causes your heart to drop quite like realizing a soon-to-be-due project has fallen through the cracks. That said, keeping everyone up to date is easier said than done, especially in companies where different departments work in different locations.

Multi-Location Offices: The New Normal

In today’s increasingly global world, more and more businesses are maintaining offices in several states (or even several countries). That comes with perks, such as the opportunity to transfer to another location, but it also comes with challenges. Collaboration, specifically, becomes harder in a multi-location office. Improving collaboration in a multi-location office provides a number of challenges; many of which cannot be overcome without the use of technology.

Communicating in a Multi-Location Office

Email certainly makes it easier to get important documents from one department to the next, but it’s not a perfect solution. The average office worker gets more than 120 emails every day. This makes it incredibly easy for important messages to be deleted or ignored.

Plus, in companies with more than one office, it’s not unusual for employees to travel on a regular basis. People are much less likely to check their email when they’re away – partially because it’s cumbersome to log into a business email on a mobile device, and partially because their attention is temporarily reallocated to other, more pressing tasks.

Unfortunately, just one missed deadline can make a big impact on a company.

Why Expediency Matters in the Enterprise

Here’s an example: you’ve just received a $25,000 invoice from one of your suppliers. If you’re able to pay that invoice within 10 days, you’re able to deduct 3 percent of what you owe. In this case, that’s $750.

But, before you’re able to pay that invoice:

  • Someone has to retrieve it from your mailbox, open it up, put it in a pile with other invoices, and deliver it to Accounts Payable.
  • Accounts Payable has to get the original purchase order from a Procurement Manager and confirm that the items were actually received.
  • Accounts Payable then has to confirm that the invoice is accurate and enter that invoice into your accounts payable software.
  • Because that invoice is a high-value transaction, the original AP employee has to send the invoice over to a manager for approval.
  • Once the invoice has been approved, it has to be sent to another manager to have the payment scheduled and recorded.

If one employee misses an email requesting their input (or worse – has a paper document placed on their desk, where it gets buried under a pile of other documents) – that entire process can come to a stop. Let’s say Accounts Payable operates out of your New York office but has to confirm receipt with your receiving warehouse in Dallas, TX. It’s not as easy as just stopping by a colleague’s office to check on the status of the request.

Remember, in this particular example, you only have 10 days to get that invoice matched, approved, and paid (plus get that payment to the vendor). That doesn’t leave much room for error. One delay could lose you that $750 discount – and that’s not a fun conversation to have with management.

How to Improve Multi-Location Office Collaboration

So how can you make cross-office collaboration easier?

Unlock Process Automation

One way to do so is to have your documents automatically transferred from department to department. With a document management system, your employees can click a single button, and the document they’re working on is automatically routed to the next person who needs it. This can be repeated until the entire process is complete (as determined by the procedures you already have in place.)

Share a Calendar

You can also have your teams share a calendar, helping different departments see what needs to be completed and when in real-time. This is easy enough to set up in most corporate email services, like Outlook, although it’s up to each individual user to remember to check it.

Speaking of reminders: a quick notification can usually be enough to get a “forgotten” project back on track. But, someone has to send that notification, and you can’t have employees making themselves responsible for their peers’ productivity.

Manage Your Workflows With Software

This is another place where automation can come in handy. If you use a software program to manage your workflows, you may be able to set up instant notifications. For instance, if a document has been in an employee’s “to-handle” pile for a set amount of time, your software can bring it (back) to their attention.

Document and Perfect Processes That Rely on Multiple Offices

Lastly, make sure you have specific procedures in place for any recurring process that involves multiple departments. There are always one-off projects that you can deal with as they occur, but things that you find yourself dealing with again and again – like invoice approvals – are easiest when standardized. Nobody is left wondering what the next step in the workflow should be, or who they need to report to when their portion of the project is complete. This is the sort of clarity that works wonders for productivity – and streamlined inter-office communication.

To learn more about how your organization can improve collaboration across the enterprise with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Workflow Automation, contact IntelliChief today.

 

Is an Invoice Management System Right for Your Business?

If you were to ask 100 companies if they would like to reduce their invoice processing costs, there is a high probability that 99 of them would say “yes.” And the one that says no? They’ve probably started their invoice automation journey already — with a full invoice management system implemented and operable. For businesses that are still managing invoices manually, an invoice management system can provide considerable cost savings while bolstering efficiency to help your Accounts Payable department improve cash flow management and visibility.

Let’s face it, manual invoice processing is expensive and time-consuming. It’s a grim reality that other companies have been grappling with for a long time. Here’s what they’re saying:

What Other Companies Are Saying About Invoice Management Systems

The Institute of Financial Operations surveyed companies about their current approach to invoice management. Here’s what they had to say:

90%

of organizations still deal with paper invoices and transaction documents

 

80%

said that their volume of invoices increased or remained roughly the same over the past year

 

60%

reported that the bulk of their increase in invoices was paper-based

 

80%

confirmed that half or more of their invoices arrived in paper format

 

90%

of total invoice volume was paper-based for majority of businesses

 

60%

of companies required between 5 and 25 full-time employees for invoice entry and validation

 

70%

had a steady or increased number of errors during invoice entry and payment in the last 18 months

 

70%

of organizations said that PO-based invoice automation is important to a comprehensive automation project

 

60%

60 percent said that they were focusing on controlling their spend and ensuring that purchases were made with preferred suppliers

 

45%

were focusing on eliminating mismatches and exceptions that lead to blocked invoice payment

 

65%

noted the average time it takes to process an invoice increased over the past year

 

50%+

were able to capture “a significant amount” of early payment discounts with invoice processing automation

 

45%

used front-end document capture software

 

20%

used optical character recognition (OCR) software to replace manual ERP keying

 

10%

had full data extraction and ERP validation capabilities

 

The statistics illustrate an alarming trend. For most companies, invoice processing is still a largely manual process, but they are also spending more time thinking about their AP processes and how they can improve them with an invoice management system.

What You Can Do To Reduce Your Invoice Processing Costs

Reducing your invoice processing costs is easier said than done, which is why we have developed comprehensive solutions, including invoice validation software, to help companies overcome these challenges. Most of our customers achieve a full ROI within one year of implementation with a 75 percent reduction in invoice processing costs. With a robust invoice management system and invoice automation capabilities, you can avoid late payment fees and expedite invoice processing to capture a higher percentage of available discounts.

IntelliChief customers also benefit by:

  • Reducing AP cycle time by 80 percent
  • Preventing time-consuming manual data entry mistakes
  • Improving visibility into the Accounts Payable processes with intuitive, decision-enhancing reports

The best part? You can keep your specific processes in place. Strategic automation is all it takes to achieve these results. with our invoice management system.

To learn more, contact us today. Or, download our AP automation overview to see more of the cost-reduction advantages.

What Is a Single Source of Truth (SSOT)?

How do you manage the data generated throughout your organization? Many companies utilize various systems of record to help store and manage this information, but it’s less often that these systems are truly integrated to facilitate data-driven decisions. For this reason, many organizations are moving toward a single source of truth (SSOT) model.

Unifying Data With a Single Source of Truth

Data plays an integral role in your organization. It’s everywhere. From Accounts Payable to Finance to Legal and Human Resources, leveraging your data is the key to supporting a more informed enterprise, but supporting your efforts to benefit from data is easier said than done.

The challenge is eliminating the information silos that form when your business relies on multiple systems of record to preserve data. The data-driven enterprise not only ensures that all members of the organization have access to the same sets of complete data but it also makes it easier for data to be produced, reviewed, and shared.

By eliminating information silos and supporting a single, complete record of data, you can help your organization benefit from a single source of truth that helps them find the answers they are looking for to better serve customers, vendors, and your business. By embracing an SSOT model, your business can make better decisions without worrying about a lack of structure or continuity to its data.

SSOT in Action

The concept of SSOT isn’t meant to be complicated. Your business needs a reliable way to access information that is both secure and streamlined. It’s important to keep in mind that SSOT isn’t defined by a certain type of software or a specific strategy, which is why we refer to it as a “concept.” Of course, supporting a single source of truth will require software and a strategy, but it’s how you implement the concept that will determine the success of your SSOT project.

Let’s use Accounts Payable as an example. In this example, the organization has 25 AP processors spread out across five locations. One of these processors is looking for a receipt to verify whether an invoice that has just been received is actually a duplicate. With a single source of truth, any permitted AP processor would be able to search and retrieve the following information about the invoice regardless of which location it was received and processed at:

  • Invoice #
  • Invoice amount
  • Vendor name
  • Vendor ID
  • Item name
  • Item ID
  • Date received
  • Date approved
  • And more

SSOT is intended to operate as an aggregator of your business-critical data, but how can this concept be applied to the real world? One way to achieve a single source of truth is by utilizing a single, integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform. By combining the best of content management and process automation, ECM supports a secure, digital repository that operates as an SSOT while also providing the connectivity and integration required for automated workflows and rules-based record maintenance automation.

The Benefits of SSOT

Do you want to guarantee that your employees have access to standardized, relevant data across the organization? This is one of the most significant benefits of SSOT. Rather than make decisions based on isolated subsets of data from various departments, you can unify your data and get big-picture insights.

It’s as if you took all of your separate departmental information silos and merged them together while preserving the credentials and permissions that keep this data secure. Everything from production data to customer service data to sales and vouchers is available from a single source. By leveraging an ECM platform, you can also support digital paper trails that link related documentation together to help your users find the answers they are looking for even more quickly.

What Technology Is Required to Support a Single Source of Truth?

You recognize the value of obtaining an SSOT, but how can your business turn this concept into tangible results? As we mentioned above, a single, integrated ECM platform checks all the boxes you need for a cutting-edge SSOT. First and foremost, it collects, standardizes, and archives unstructured data to ensure that it is usable in a wide range of applications. Second, it integrates with your ERP, HCM, and other business applications for seamless connectivity without hiccups. Finally, your ECM platform must act as the “interface” for managing this information; even going so far as to allow you to manipulate data in your ERP from your ECM screens in real-time.

Any ECM platform that can satisfy these requirements should be able to serve your SSOT needs; however, if you truly want a seamless environment that doesn’t create friction for your data, you will want to find a solution that supports Mobile Content Management to help you expand your operational area to account for employees working from home or in the field.

To learn more about how your organization can utilize Enterprise Content Management to support a single source of truth, contact IntelliChief today.

How Does a Content Management System Work?

Your organization’s content is the linchpin of its success. This content, comprised of invoices, sales orders, onboarding forms, employee files, interdepartmental correspondence, and more, is the fuel that drives your business forward. Without a reliable way to manage this content, such as a content management system (CMS) or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, information cannot be passed from user to user in an efficient manner. But how does a content management system work? And why is it so important for enterprises?

How Content Management Works in Favor of Your Business

When information stops flowing through an organization, operations come to a grinding halt and your ability to generate revenue is compromised. On a normal day, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how content flows through your organization, but every task you perform is integral to this process.

Due to the collaborative nature of many business processes (i.e., Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Human Resources, Customer Service, etc.) breakdowns in your content management cycle are rarely isolated incidences. One small hiccup can lead to late payments, process bottlenecks, and dissatisfied customers and business partners. Effective content management helps you mitigate, or altogether eliminate, deficiencies in your content management cycle.

How does a content management system achieve this goal? Below, we explore the process flow and features that can be utilized to your advantage when implementing a best-in-class ECM system to help you manage your content.

Information Is Captured From All Forms of Content

For enterprises, the stream of information flooding into your organization at all times can be very difficult to maintain, organize, and process. Sometimes, this content is structured, which simplifies the process of handling it. However, a large volume of this information is unstructured or requires some form of manual processing to become structured. One of the most important concepts of content management is the structuring of unstructured information. In terms of accelerating business processes, structured data has far more utility than unstructured data.

Capture technology is an integral component of ECM. By utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to capture information from all forms of content, your organization can begin to add structure to its information at scale. Not every piece of OCR software is up to the task. Consider the differences between basic OCR software and an enterprise-class solution:

  • Basic OCR: “Scans” a paper document and creates a digital replica that can be stored and retrieved electronically.
  • Advanced or Enterprise OCR: “Reads” paper and electronic documents and identifies key information, and tags/archives it accordingly.

More advanced forms of OCR are preferred by enterprises because they utilize other advanced technologies, such as machine learning, to capture and process content intelligently. The value of this added intelligence will be made clear in the next section.

Content Is Tagged, Indexed, and Archived

Once an organization’s content has been digitized, it still needs to be tagged with metadata so that users can search for and retrieve the information they are looking for. With basic OCR, this information must be keyed in manually. However, with an advanced, enterprise-class OCR component, this step can be handled automatically by your ECM system, saving your business time and money.

Advanced OCR can recognize what type of content it is capturing as well as the specific datapoints found on the content. For example, if you receive an invoice in the mail for x number of widgets, OCR software can not only create a digital replica but also tag the invoice based on any number of identifying criteria, index the information accordingly, and archive the invoice in a secure digital repository.

But that’s not all. It can also recognize the process that needs to be carried out to satisfy the invoice request.

Content Is Processed Through Workflows

Once the process has been identified (i.e., an invoice is received so the AP workflow must be carried out), you can start managing your content through digital workflows that follow your unique business rules. Workflows can be customized to fit your exact processes. Continuing with the invoice processing example, you can set permissions based on the value of an invoice, the vendor that sent the invoice, or the time at which the invoice was received. These are a few common examples but you can tailor your workflows as needed to account for all the nuances in your process — no matter how specific.

Depending on the complexity of your content management system, your organization may also be able to automate workflows, greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to process an invoice from start to finish. Another important benefit of workflows is they help protect your company against duplicate payments, missed early payment discounts, and other potential filing and processing errors. In summary, the ability to capture content, tag it, index it, store it, and process it through workflows are all fundamental to an advanced, enterprise-class content management system.

Automated Retention Policies Are Executed

So far, we’ve covered three of the key features that help answer the central question:

How does a content management system work?

However, the capabilities of your chosen content management or ECM system must also account for documents that need to be terminated in addition to those that must be preserved for a certain period of time. Otherwise, your business could find itself in hot water when the time comes to provide evidence of regulatory compliance. Content management systems (typically ECM), can also automate retention policies to ensure that your organization is prepared for an audit at the drop of a hat. This makes dealing with HIPPA, SOX, and other regulations a breeze — even if your company deals with hundreds of thousands of documents a year (or more).

Managing Your Enterprise Content With ECM

When an organization manages its content with ECM, it helps them to eliminate paper dependence, streamline and standardize business processes, reduce risk, boost productivity to all-time highs, serve better customer experiences, and provide superior transparency over all connected business operations. Whether you deploy ECM in Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Human Resources, Customer Service, or any other department that processes large volumes of information, your organization will experience a multitude of benefits only possible with a comprehensive content management plan backed by a best-in-class ECM system.

Is your organization searching for a solution to its content-related woes? The experts at IntelliChief can help. Contact us today to learn about our industry-leading ECM solutions and unrivaled approach to business process automation.

 

The 7 Components of ECM

You’ve decided that your organization needs to make a change to get faster, more competitive, and less resource hungry — and you want to start by eliminating paper. But where to start?

For many businesses, the answer is Enterprise Content Management (ECM). But what is Enterprise Content Management? And what do the various components of ECM mean for your organization?

The 5 Components of ECM According to AIIM

No, that subheading isn’t a typo. Before we breaking into all seven ECM components, we should reference the list put out by the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM).  They define ECM as a ” formalized means of organizing and storing an establishment’s documents, and other content, that relate to the establishment’s processes.”

Following this definition, they have divided ECM into five components, including:

  1. Capture
  2. Manage
  3. Store
  4. Preserve
  5. Deliver

We briefly explore these components of Enterprise Content Management below:

1. Capture

Capture is the process of using OCR Software to convert information from paper documents into an electronic format. Capture is key to turning unstructured data into structured data and creating metadata for search and retrieval. It includes:

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Intelligent Character Recognition(ICR)
  • Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)
  • Barcode Recognition

2. Manage

The “manage” component refers to the management of every captured document throughout every stage of its lifecycle. Managing your electronic content means automating retention policies, digital collaboration, Document Management, Business Process Management (BPM), and more.

3. Store

Securely storing your information is essential if you want to protect your customers, employees, partners, and, of course, your business. With ECM, all digitized documents are stored in a secure digital repository that can only be accessed by permitted users.

4. Preserve

Preservation of your information builds on the “store” component. Reliable ong-term storage is essential for regulatory compliance and to ensure that you have everything accounted for whenever the need arises.

5. Deliver

According to AIIM, delivery (output management) is the final component of ECM and is composed of three groups:

  • Transformation Technologies
  • Security Technologies
  • Distribution

The 7 Components of Enterprise Content Management According to IntelliChief

AIIM’s breakdown of ECM does a great job of covering the fundamental requirements of a true ECM system; however, it fails to account for two very important factors. In fact, these two factors are arguably the most important things to consider when shopping for a best-in-class ECM solution. These factors also bookend AIIM’s list, rendering them absolutely essential. Below, we’ll explain why as we detail our list of the seven components of Enterprise Content Management as advised by our experience implementing ECM for hundreds of companies across the United States and beyond. They include:

  1. Integrate
  2. Capture
  3. Manage
  4. Store
  5. Preserve
  6. Deliver
  7. Automate

6. Integrate

Simply put, you cannot adopt an ECM system without a seamless integration with your core technologies. It’s just not going to happen. This is an essential component of ECM that cannot be overlooked. Whether you utilize Oracle, JD Edwards, Infor, SAP, Microsoft, or another system of record entirely, your ECM solution needs to act as a connector between these systems to ensure that business processes can be completed to satisfaction and information can be shared across departments or business units when required. It’s also essential for our seventh and final component of ECM.

7. Automate

Automation is arguably the biggest value add when it comes to leveraging an ECM platform for your company. Tedious, time-consuming tasks such as document filing, invoice processing, sales order processing, and more can be automated from start to finish with best-in-class ECM. In our experience implementing ECM For hundreds of customers, the ability to automate Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Order Processing, and other important business functions were commonly the main incentives for implementing ECM. Of course, the Content Management side of ECM is essential, but the cost savings made possible through automation are unheralded.

To learn more about how Enterprise Content Management transforms businesses by giving them superior control of information, documentation, and business processes, contact IntelliChief today.

 

Document Management vs. Content Management: Which Is Right For Your Business?

Large, complex organizations use many systems of record to maintain and manage information. As new documentation enters a company, it must be processed in an efficient manner to ensure that business is fluid and revenue is trending upwards.  Invoices, sales orders, employee files, bills of lading…the work of processing documents is never done. Fortunately, there are software-based solutions to help make this workload more manageable. For most companies, it comes down to document management vs. content management, but what exactly are the differences between these two solutions? And which one is right for your business?

Document Management

Document Management leverages electronic documents to streamline workflows. Whereas paper documents must be manually reviewed, transferred, and filed, electronic documents can be dealt with from a desktop or mobile device. It utilizes a secure, digital repository to ensure that all documents are available to permitted users at all times. It’s more secure, it speeds up processing, and it helps simplify the process of bringing new users into the fold. It can be used to manage all paper and electronic documents, including emails, faxes, and more. The secret to Document Management is the process of tagging and indexing documents, which ensures they can be retrieved instantly to be edited, escalated, or otherwise.

Effective Document Management is predicated on a number of factors, including:

  • The ability to retain documents electronically
  • The ability to view the history of how a document has been handled
  • The ability to add notations to documents
  • The ability to recover lost documents
  • The ability to search and retrieve documents
  • The ability to issue natural language prompts instructing the user on what to do next

Before we move to the other side of the Document Management vs. Content Management debate, it’s important to note that Document Management Software (DMS) must integrate with your core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and any other systems of record that you utilize to ensure your business can eliminate information silos across the enterprise.

Content Management

Content Management, or Enterprise Content Management (ECM), takes all of the features of Document Management and adds additional processing capabilities through the use of workflows, automation, and machine learning.

In plain terms, Document Management falls under the umbrella of Content Management. Therefore, the Document Management vs. Content Management (DMS vs. ECM) debate is an easy one to settle if you focus on your organizational goals. Do you want to simply go paperless? Document Management will help you get there. However, if you want to go paperless and automate business-critical processes like Procure-to-Pay (P2P) and Order-to-Cash (O2C), you will need the added capabilities only found in an ECM system.

Enterprise Content Management vs. Document Management System: Settling the Debate

Whether you choose to invest in Document Management or Content Management, you will be providing your organization with a valuable tool to help it achieve an operational boost. Your team will thank you because their jobs will get easier and less manual. Your customers will thank you because you will be able to deliver excellent experiences that show them you care. And your organization will thank you because you will be increasing your bottom line and giving your business the stimulus to grow and flourish.

Are you still unsure about your organization’s content management system vs. document management system decision? Our experts are happy to help. Contact IntelliChief today and let us know about your project. We’ll guide you towards your ideal solution and answer any questions you might have.

Improving Your Accounts Payable Audit Procedures With Automation

Accounts Payable audits. Even if you’re prepared for them, you still dread them. There are always more Accounts Payable audit procedures than you plan for, and they tend to be incredibly costly, too.

Even though you can’t avoid them, you can automate the prep work, making it so that your Accounts Payable team no longer has to stop what they’re doing to find a random, years-old document that your auditor requests. It also means that your hourly payments aren’t wasted on time spent rummaging through filing cabinets in an attempt to locate a specific document or invoice.

Reduce The Amount of Time Your Employees Spend Sourcing Your On- or Off-Site Records

Accounts Payable Automation not only automates invoice processing but also your AP audit preparation. Everything you need to prove compliance is readily available. Your processors no longer need to log the auditor’s request and search for documents manually. To streamline things even further, you can extend access to your auditors so they can access your archive through a dedicated on-site workstation, further decreasing the time required to complete an audit.

You have complete visibility into your inbound and outbound payments and a paper trail of who authorized what. It’s a complete record that maintains itself and provides more detail than what is present on the document itself.

Keep Your AP Audits On Schedule and Under Budget

As a component of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, your AP Automation solution should be able to provide real-time access to your documents across each of your individual systems. Everything in your archive is organized from the get-go, and searchable by any logged metadata. Say goodbye to the unnecessary overages that you used to incur as you waited (and waited) for your audits to be completed. This technology also makes it easier and more cost-effective to implement a more rigorous internal audit schedule. It’s so easy, in fact, that you could achieve daily AP audits if necessary.

Streamlined Audit Reporting

Of course, audits don’t end after the information-gathering stage. Whether you use internal or independent audits, you still need to report on their findings. Accounts Payable Automation software makes it easy for you to share key data sets with your management, advisers, financiers, and investors.

An ECM-based AP Automation solution will allow you to deliver reports with custom dashboards, or you can use the self-service reporting tool to let each stakeholder access what they want to see. Some solutions, such as IntelliChief, require no coding knowledge, instead, relying on intuitive drag-and-drop simplicity that lets users visualize each audit’s results within seconds. Once reports are complete, they can be scheduled, shared, and archived in the user’s choice of electronic file format.

Improve Your Accounts Payable Audit Procedures With IntelliChief

We pioneered the Accounts Payable Automation movement, which is why we’re proud to offer the most fully featured and complete AP Automation solution on the market. Our industry-leading straight-through processing rates combined with our resiliency as a strategic partner has helped us serve the needs of hundreds of customers across the United States and beyond. Improving your Accounts Payable audit procedures is easy with IntelliChief!

For more information on automating your AP audits, contact IntelliChief today. We’ll show you how to save your valuable resources for other, more important projects.

What Is Digital Procurement?

According to Accenture, “the procurement organization has been largely left behind in the digital revolution.” While this may be true in some respects, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that digital procurement can’t be achieved through the use of existing technologies such as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), which consolidates several core business technologies to provide real-time insights, superior process control, and streamlined decision making throughout the procurement process.

The Basics of Digital Procurement

The purpose of digital procurement is to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks that are detrimental to efficiency and burden your organization with unnecessary costs. By equipping procurement professionals in your organization with the tools they need to improve daily operations and perform their job at the highest level, you can reinvent the way you approach interactions with suppliers and third parties by supporting an integrated platform that brings all stakeholders to the table for direct collaboration.

It’s no secret that error-prone business processes can derail procurement and cause friction between your organization and the suppliers it depends on. Digital procurement is designed to mitigate these challenges by streamlining the procurement process and insulating it against human error.

The Benefits of Digital Procurement

When considering whether digital procurement is right for your organization, it’s important to consider how it will impact your organization from both a cost and efficiency standpoint. By digitizing procurement, you are effectively equipping your team with the tools to work faster and smarter — not harder. But what makes digital procurement such a game-changer for enterprises?

Hello Data, Goodbye Uncertainty

It’s easy to lose sight of the fine minutiae of your procurement process, but the only way to see the “bigger picture” is by collecting actionable data to help you understand how you can improve procurement. In a highly manual procurement department, it’s impossible to track data on what was purchased, at what price, when, and for what reason. These insights are made available with digital procurement, allowing for more informed decision making.

Equipped With the Tools for Success

For many companies, digital procurement is only one aspect of digital transformation that they plan to pursue. From Accounts Payable Automation to Mobile Content Management and Records Retention, the ECM technologies that help you digitize procurement are also effective across other business units and processes. In other words, ECM-based digital procurement equips your organization with the tools to succeed wherever efficiency is a concern.

Superior Spend Management

Digital procurement paves the way for procurement automation, which means a more structured procurement process that suffers from fewer instances of off-contract or non-catalog spending. Purchasers are no longer required to go looking elsewhere for materials from unvetted suppliers you haven’t established rapport with. This means less tail spend and a greater focus on boosting the spend being managed directly by your procurement team.

Industry-Leading Cost Savings

Digital procurement connects your organization with its suppliers in more ways than ever before. Of course, cost savings are a primary driver for any process digitization or automation project, but it’s important to underscore this benefit so your organization understands how these savings are being achieved. For example, by consolidating procurement operations to a single platform, it becomes much easier to compare prices. Similarly, users can examine pricing trends to identify when a purchase price seems higher than it should be.

One Platform, Unlimited Possibilities

It’s impossible to understate the value of a single-platform solution. You don’t want your procurement team to constantly navigate from one window to the next to complete purchases. If they can make decisions from one screen without getting lost in extraneous information, it will improve transparency across your entire supply chain. Fairmarkit recommends “sharing data with your suppliers” as this can give you “insight into next-tier suppliers and upstream value chains.”

Anticipate Risk

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that even the most prepared organizations can’t predict the future. Business interruptions come in all shapes and sizes, including:

  • Widespread health-related events
  • Geopolitical risks
  • Climate change
  • Economic uncertainty
  • Human error
  • And more

By digitizing your supply chain, you are taking the first steps to insulate one of your most business-critical processes against factors you can’t control.

Is Procurement Digitization Right for Your Company?

Procurement digitization plays an important role in your company’s digital transformation, but it’s only one small step in the grand scheme of things — if automation is a goal for the future of your company. Ideally, companies that invest in digital procurement will expand their solution to encompass the entire P2P cycle. With an end-to-end solution automating every step of the P2P process, your company can save time and money by identifying and eliminating process deficiencies that hurt businesses.

To learn more about procurement digitization and Accounts Payable Automation, contact IntelliChief today.

Warehouse Management Solution Providers

What to Look for in ECM Warehouse Management Solution Providers

Warehouse Management Solution Providers

Warehouse operations are comprised of numerous processes, including receiving, put away, storage, picking, packing, and shipping. If your organization is heavily reliant on products and filed assets, these operations are crucial for delivering excellent customer experiences and fulfilling your obligations to the customer every time they invest their dollars into your products. The best way to nullify the costly ramifications of poorly managed warehouses is to seek help from warehouse management solution providers. After all, the way you operate your warehouses can have a widespread effect across your entire organization.

Maintaining a tight grip on warehouse operations is the only way to keep pace with competitors that have already revamped their business processes and invested in the latest warehouse management solutions. These businesses are leading by example, integrating everything from e-commerce to curbside pickup to facilitate uninterrupted customer access to the products that generate revenue for your business. Are you ready to take your warehouses to the next level of operational efficiency? Consider these points when vetting warehouse management solution providers.

Integration With Warehouse Management Software (WMS)

The first thing to consider when browsing warehouse management solution providers is whether or not their solution can integrate with your Warehouse Management Software (WMS) to provide a safe and seamless connection between your core technologies and the solution that will help you get the most out of them. Whether you rely on NetSuite WMS, JDA Warehouse Management, Infor Warehouse Management, Aptean Catalyst WMS, or another WMS, the first thing you should do when approaching a solution provider is detail your core technologies and warehouse infrastructure so they can gauge whether the scope of your project aligns with the capabilities of their solution.

For large enterprises and companies that employ complex warehouse networks, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution that integrates with your WMS will provide the full breadth of features and integrations required to streamline warehouse operations across multiple locations.

ECM for the Warehouse

What does ECM for the warehouse look like? Imagine a warehouse where all receiving, packing, and shipping documentation has been digitized for instant recall from a centralized digital repository; one where documentation can be accessed, reviewed, and processed from any computer or mobile device. By improving content management throughout all your warehouses, your organization can reduce costs and errors while reaching unheralded perfect order rates that help you outshine your competitors. However, that is only half of ECM for the warehouse. ECM is a robust solution intended to help organizations get the most out of every department; from Accounts Payable to Finance to Legal and Human Resources and beyond. This means your ECM solution is capable of solving a diverse set of enterprise problems. It can call upon an unprecedented set of tools and technologies to provide the fastest, safest, and most cost-effective warehouse management solutions. ECM’s content management capabilities are effective for insulating warehouses against erroneous orders and more, but it truly shines when automation is factored into the equation, too.

Point Solutions for the Warehouse

As opposed to ECM for the warehouse, which can enhance performance across all warehouse operations, some companies choose to address one aspect of warehouse operations at a time. For example, they might invest in a solution that only assists with the receiving or shipping of products to and from the warehouse. The merits of this approach are largely focused on cost; however, these “point solutions” are less focused on integration and cohesion – and more focused on doing one thing right. Therefore, other deficiencies in your warehouse operations will likely require the assistance of an additional vendor. This can be a cause for concern because most point solutions do not integrate with one another without custom coding, which quickly drives up the cost of your project, especially for projects requiring a multi-ERP integration.

Warehouse Management Challenges

After deciding between point solutions and ECM and forming a list of potential warehouse management solution providers, it is time to consult your warehouse managers to discuss the everyday challenges they face. These discussions should be thorough and cover every stage of your warehouse operations. Once these discussions have taken place, you can take your key findings to the warehouse management solution providers on your shortlist to see if they can meet your project requirements. Some common warehouse-related challenges include:

  • Returns
  • Restocking
  • Employee Management
  • Inventory Management
  • Picking Optimization
  • Warehouse Intelligence
  • Paper Volume
  • Labor Shortages
  • Blanket Pricing

ECM addresses these challenges by improving visibility, control, and access to information in your warehouses. Operating as an extension of your legacy systems, ECM acts as a single platform for accessing and processing all warehouse-related documentation. As a result, every worker in your warehouse is equipped with the knowledge to perform their duties more efficiently. Everything from pick sheets to cycle counts and capacity constraints is factored into your workflows, which can then be optimized, standardized, and automated with your ECM solution monitoring them for relevant documentation as it enters your system. In other words, it increases visibility to help reduce lead time, balance fulfillment rates, manage backorders, improve service levels, and boost customer loyalty for sustained growth.

Overcoming Warehouse Challenges With Your Warehouse Management Solution Provider

For most companies, warehouse management is not viewed as a strength. Unless your company is Amazon, which employs process, robotic, and industrial automation to support nearly autonomous warehouses, there is a strong possibility that your warehouses have untapped potential. Whether that means reducing your warehouses’ financial impact on your company or elevating warehouse performance to satisfy customers, ECM for the warehouse is the only all-in-one solution for not only addressing all warehouse-related deficiencies but also process inefficiencies across the enterprise.

Are you interested in learning more about how your organization can leverage ECM to boost visibility and efficiency in your warehouse operations? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our award-winning approach to Enterprise Content Management.

5 Ways to Improve Human Capital Management With ECM

ECM for HR

Human Resources and Human Capital Management are among the most document-intensive areas of your organization. For the employees working in your HR department, the amount of documentation flowing into your organization can feel truly endless. Everything from employee applications to contractor 1099s need to be dealt with quickly and efficiently — and there’s always more coming in.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a valuable resource that can help boost the resourcefulness of your HR department. With ECM, your business can automate the information processing activities that your HR department faces every day.  As new HR documents enter your organization, whether in-person, by mail, fax, email, or otherwise, every record is captured, digitized, and organized for quick, secure electronic access and archival. It’s a low-cost, long-term approach to managing your HR resources that will help you maintain records compliance and avoid lost or damaged records.

Getting Started With ECM for HCM

HR automation leverages ECM to capture and digitize information for convenient use across your HR department. Once this is complete, documents can only be retrieved through a password-protected digital repository that integrates seamlessly with HRM/HRIS. Employees in your HR department can utilize search features for instanteous retrieval of any document or record —from any desktop or mobile device. Documents that have been saved to your ECM system can then procssed automatically using workflow automation that routes documents to managers, contractors, and other decision-makers for review or approval. Ready to get started? Here are five ways to improve Human Capital Management with ECM:

1. Consolidate Documents Regardless of Format

HR managers have to deal with both paper-based and electronic documents. You need a solution that can uniformly format and convert paper documents into electronic files with minimal input. From there, that system needs to organize your documents based on specific criteria, giving you a single, searchable system for document storage.

2. Validate Data Effortlessly

ECM helps you validate data quickly and with minimal effort. The faster and more accurate you’re able to transfer information from paper to digital, the lower your HR costs will be. Plus, as a bonus,when your documents are stored electronically, the cost of on- and off-site paper file storage is reduced or eliminated.

3. Improve Functionality Through Seamless Integrations

Integrating ECM with your Human Capital Management software will allow you to get the most out of both systems. Premier ECM solutions sync data with your HCM database or ERP in real-time. This way, you only have to process information once, from a single platform, and it’s automatically updated from there on out.

4. Eliminate Information Silos

Improving interdepartmental workflows is one of the most common reasons why enterprises implement ECM for HCM. HR connects multiple departments and often involves frustrating information silos. However, these can be eliminated with an enterprise-class solution designed to scale to multiple departments post implementation. ECM can help you route your documents, secure approvals, and increase visibility to significantly streamline your internal procedures.

5. Secure, Audit-Friendly Storage

Are you protecting the integrity and long-term accessibility of your records. If a disaster were to occur, what would happen to your company’s records? Secure archival is imperative to business continuity through temporary and catastrophic occurrences. Digital storage even protects against inadvertent storage errors caused by manual filing. Arguably the most impressive feature of ECM technology is the ability to apply automtion rules to virtually any task that is being executed using your digitized documents. In other words, you can set automated retention policies to ensure that you have what you need, when you need it — nothing extraneous clogging up your system.

Are You Ready to Improve Human Capital Management Productivity?

According to Forrester Research, “Human Resources departments typically use 50% of their staff’s time handling manual, mostly paper-driven personnel administrative tasks.” As the impact of Human Capital Management continues to expand, you and your staff are losing half your time to non-strategic tasks. Your company needs you to focus on more critical contributions. To make this happen, you need to become more resourceful – and IntelliChief is here to help.

To learn more about ECM in HCM, contact IntelliChief today.

4 Tips for Going Paperless

There are many benefits of transitioning to digital paperwork but going paperless is not as simple as making a pledge to stop using paper. Going paperless requires an investment in technology and a close relationship with a vendor that can provide the tools and knowledge to help your organization eliminate its reliance on paper. This article discusses four tips for going paperless to help business leaders understand how to go paperless while avoiding the common pitfalls that can derail your initiative.

How to Go Paperless

Before we explore our tips for going paperless, it is important for businesses to understand how to go paperless in the first place. Migrating from paper to digital takes time, patience, collaboration, and investment. Covid-19 has accelerated the timeline for many companies who had “going paperless” on their to-do lists moving into next year, which means you need to start planning your paperless strategy today if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

The first step in going paperless is identifying a suitable strategic partner that specializes in transitioning businesses from paper-based workflows to digital workflows. Several types of vendors can assist with this transition, but an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor will offer the most robust feature set allowing for greater functionality, compatibility, integration, performance, and scalability. However, before you can choose your vendor, you need to organize your company internally and get everyone on the same page. Follow these four tips for going paperless to start your search:

1. Create an Internal Team to Lead Your Paperless Initiative

Even if you hire a third-party consultant to help you evaluate and vet vendors, nobody knows your business like you do, so it’s essential that you form a trusted team internally to ensure your project is moving towards your goal at all times. Establish a team that fully understands your company’s business processes, including the underlying workflows that are not always consistent from person to person. For example, if you want to go paperless in Accounts Payable, you should form a team including members of your AP department and perhaps a member of your IT department to help translate any technical information that might not register with your AP Director, CFO, or your most active AP processor.

2. Consult Key Decision-Makers and Address Concerns

After establishing your team, it is time to consult them about their specific pain points. What do they hope to achieve by going paperless? What concerns do they have? How will they measure the success of the project? What will happen if the scope of work changes? You need answers to all the questions before you select a vendor. Even after you choose a vendor, the answers to these questions may change, but you want to set clear goals early and establish a precedent to avoid significant changes once your project has commenced. Remember, you can’t make everyone happy, but you can satisfy your team by listening to and considering every idea and pain point presented to you.

3. Develop a Roadmap

Now, it is time to get started! Talk to your implementation team, your consultant (if you have one), and any vendors you are currently vetting. Together, you can plot your roadmap and establish a plan that will get your key decision-makers to buy-in. Keep your existing processes top of mind when developing your roadmap. Which processes can be improved? Which ones need to stay the same? Keeping with the example of going paperless in AP, you must create standard operating procedures in collaboration with your AP team to ensure that your workflows are documented accurately. You must also plan for growth and scaling across multiple departments (if that is your endgame).

These considerations must be addressed openly with your vendor to ensure that they can truly provide the technology your business is searching for. Many companies go paperless in one department, such as Accounts Payable, and later expand their solution to other departments, including Accounts Receivable, Human Resources, Customer Service, and more. If this is the goal of your business, it must be accounted for in your initial roadmap to ensure the right vendor is selected.

4. Establish Clear Expectations

Ultimately, these tips for going paperless are worthless if your project fails to meet your requirements, but this pitfall can be easily avoided by setting clear expectations from the beginning. Answer important questions like:

  • How soon do you want your implementation to be completed?
  • How important is integration with your core technologies?
  • What is your expected ROI?
  • Do you want to process documentation without human intervention?

Your specific expectations will be unique to your business, and your list may grow after speaking to a vendor, so be sure to maintain transparency as you create your list of requirements.

Are you interested in learning more about how your organization can go paperless? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our award-winning approach to Enterprise Content Management.

Electronic Personnel Files

Electronic Personnel Files Best Practices

Electronic Personnel Files

Your workplace records policy plays an essential role in helping your business maintain compliance with federal and state laws and regulations governing employee file access, retention, and security. If you’ve ever had a brush with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), then you fully understand the importance of a reliable workplace records policy. That said, if your business is making the transition from paper records to electronic personnel files (as it should), it’s crucial to take a step back and re-examine your workplace records policy to ensure that you are employing electronic personnel files best practices to protect your company. This article summarizes several electronic personnel files best practices and answers essential questions, including:

  • What are electronic personnel files?
  • What is records retention? (And how can it be simplified?)
  • Why is controlling access to electronic employee files critical?
  • What are the electronic personnel files best practices for storage?
  • What is the best procedure for the destruction of HR-related documentation?
  • Why must my workplace records policy be standardized to avoid compliance issues?
  • How does Enterprise Content Management (ECM) support security and privacy in Human Resources?

What Are Electronic Personnel Files?

Electronic personnel files contain employee records related to personal information, background, employment history, and more. Traditionally, these records were consolidated in a single personnel file (i.e. a folder in a file cabinet). When an employee or employer needed to access information about a particular employee, they could reference their personnel file and browse through the available records contained therein. For small businesses with only a handful of employees, maintaining personnel files the old-fashioned way is relatively simple as there isn’t that much information to keep track of. Unfortunately, as businesses grow and evolve, so do their HR-related needs. What started as a single file cabinet for personnel files might expand to 10, 50, 100, or more.

In Human Resources, electronic personnel files eliminate the need for paper-based records and personnel files as well as the physical storage required to house them. Instead of sifting through cabinet after cabinet or calling into a storage facility for a copy of an employee file, electronic personnel files are stored securely on a server where they can be accessed instantly by approved team members. When your HR department needs to review information about an employee, they can retrieve their electronic personnel files with the touch of a button, expediting access to pre-employment documents, employment documentation, and separation of employment documents. Of course, not all employee files are available in their personnel file.

Medical information, credit information, immigration forms, and any documents relating to company complaints or investigations should be consolidated in a separate file (or files); however, these files can still be stored as electronic copies to enhance security and ensure compliance. As we will discuss later, ECM tools can help your HR department eliminate guesswork by creating standardized HR workflows to accelerate HR business processes and keep your records organized according to electronic personnel files best practices.

What Is Records Retention?

According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), “The length of time you should keep a document depends on the action, expense, or event which the document records.” Although this statement is certainly in reference to taxes, it succinctly describes the objective of records retention — to hold or retain records for the right amount of time to avoid negative consequences. Your retention policy will be determined by state and federal law as well as your own internal retention policies, but managing both can be a challenge.  This is one of the primary reasons why businesses opt to shift from paper records to electronic personnel files — compliance. Compliance is something most business leaders worry about. Things tend to slip through the cracks when you don’t have a tight grip on your business or visibility into all of your business processes.

With ECM tools, you can set automated retention policies based on pre-existing compliance rules or your very own custom rules. These policies are rendered actionable using a robust workflow engine that aligns with your business rules. For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) states “Medical records must be maintained for the duration of employment plus 30 years.” Automated retention policies let you “set it and forget it” while maintaining compliance.

With ECM software integrated with your HRM or HRIS system, your retention policies for specific electronic personnel files will be updated according to actions occurring throughout your organization. That way, when an employee quits and you update your system of record accordingly, this change is identified by your ECM system and the appropriate retention policy is applied to all electronic personnel files for that specific employee.

You can also automate your retention schedule for each classification of documentation, even records governed by more than one law. Whether you retain documents for the minimum or maximum time allowed by law is your choice. ECM software also makes it easy to identify documents that don’t have clear retention policies, such as records related to pending claims or litigation. The SHRM website features a summary of federal record retention requirements, which can be used to inform your records retention policy.

Why Is Controlling Access to Electronic Employee Files Critical?

Controlling access to electronic personnel files is essential for compliance. Your employees’ information is confidential. As an employer, you have a responsibility to ensure that this information is granted privacy. For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was enacted in 1996, ensures that “all forms of individuals’ protected health information, whether electronic, written, or oral” are protected (The Privacy Rule). It also requires health information to be stored in electronic form (The Security Rule). Additionally, there are countless privacy regulations that contain highly specific provisions regarding who can (and who can’t) access and use information. By taking the time to identify current and former employee rights dealing with personnel file access, you can implement a strategy to control access to protected electronic employee files. Better yet, your ECM provider can help you by leveraging their experience helping other companies become more compliance-friendly.

What Are the Electronic Personnel Files Best Practices for Storage?

Companies that digitize HR documentation in electronic personnel files store these files in a secure and centralized digital repository. This repository, an important component of any ECM solution, serves as the connection point between your electronic personnel files and system of record. With a seamlessly integrated solution, managing HR documentation in an ECM platform will provide real-time updates in your HRM or HRIS system. It can even apply business rules to certain documents, similar to how automated retention policies operate, to streamline HR processes. Look for a solution that is safe, secure, intuitive, and integrated with your other core technologies to protect the integrity of your system as a whole.

What Is the Best Procedure for the Destruction of HR-Related Documentation?

Every company has a different procedure for the destruction of HR-related documents. For destroying paper documents, paper shredders are the most common tool of destruction. However, many people have found creative ways to destroy paper using everything from a controlled burn to soaking them in water. In the workplace, you should employ a standardized method for destroying HR-related documents — nothing too crazy.

In a paper-based office, you need to determine a process for verifying that retention requirements have been satisfied and choose a disposal method that can be executed quickly and efficiently. In an ECM-integrated office, you don’t need to worry about any of these things. Your system will monitor all of your documents and execute your unique burn policy automatically without any human intervention. It’s a simple, reliable way to handle the destruction of documents.

Why Must My Workplace Records Policy Be Standardized to Avoid Compliance Issues?

Your workplace records policy, including your retention policy, should be standardized to prevent your business from deviating into noncompliance. Consistency is key, which means your policy implementation should align with your ECM strategy to get the most out of your system. In a paper-based office, how do you ensure that your record retention rules and procedures are being applied the same way every single time? By failing to standardize your workplace records policy, you can never be completely sure your next audit will go the way you expect. By integrating Enterprise Content Management software with your existing HR technologies, you can support Human Resources by giving them the resources to deftly oversee all electronic employee files while automating time-consuming and tedious processes that lead to errors, mix-ups, and gaffes.

How Does Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Support Security and Privacy in Human Resources?

Whether your records are stored physically or electronically, protecting the confidentiality of employee records should always be a chief priority. We’ve mentioned ECM software throughout this article as being a beneficial tool that supports security and privacy to strengthen your workplace records policy — but why is this the case? Here’s a summary:

  • ECM tools, like OCR Software and Document Management, digitize your paper-based employee records into secure digital files that significantly expand your HR processing capabilities.
  • With ECM software, electronic personnel files can be stored in a secure and centralized digital repository for on-demand storage and retrieval.
  • Electronic personnel files can only be accessed by team members with the proper level of permission, eliminating the potential for unwanted eyes.
  • Electronic personnel files can be processed with minimal (or no) human intervention using HR Automation capabilities found in industry-leading ECM solutions.
  • By implementing automated retention policies and secure backups, you can preserve all personnel files, maintain compliance, and expedite audits.

By integrating an Enterprise Content Management system with your existing system of record, you can insulate your records for privacy and greatly increase security while leveraging the benefits of electronic personnel files and HR Automation to improve efficiency.

Want to learn more about electronic personnel files best practices using Enterprise Content Management and HR Automation? Contact IntelliChief today to speak with one of our experts about your needs and requirements.

ECM for Customer Service

How to Retain Customers Who Are Leaving By Implementing ECM for Customer Service

ECM for Customer Service

There is an inherent disconnect between enterprise executives and the consumers they serve, one that is hard to address — even for companies with a long track record of success. Rapid marketplace innovation means keeping up with consumer expectations is more difficult than ever before, especially when it comes to Customer Service. This article analyzes several consumer behavior trends and devises strategies to help you retain customers that are leaving by implementing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Customer Service.

Established companies around the world are acutely aware of the challenges of the current marketplace. As the cost of new customer acquisition continues to spike, refocusing on the customers that made your company successful in the first place has become imperative. There’s never been a better time to invest in customer retention, and there’s never been a better way than investing in your company, especially when those investments help improve the customer experience and, therefore, customer loyalty. As an enterprise executive, the following consumer behavior trends might be alarming, but when acted upon by implementing ECM with your Customer Service Management or Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, they can actually help you plot the course for a more successful future. How will you respond?

Even Loyal Customers Are Comparison-Shopping

Customers are no longer willing to stick with a vendor based on loyalty alone. Comparison-shopping has become deeply ingrained in our consumer culture, which means your best customers, the ones your business depends on to make large purchases regularly, could be eyeing your competitors to see if they offer cheaper prices, better service, more attractive loyalty incentives, or superior products. It’s just what today’s consumers do. There’s no use fighting it — you have to adapt. While customer loyalty continues to flounder, consumerism is at an all-time high, which means a customer lost is undoubtedly a customer gained for one of your competitors. This is one of the primary reasons why many businesses are turning to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Workflow Automation to increase back-office efficiency and serve better customer experiences. When discussing the laurels of ECM versus CRM, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: scalability. ECM can help you streamline and automate your Customer Service department while integrating with other technologies throughout the enterprise to insulate your business against disruptions and technical anomalies inherent to disparate or “point” solutions.

Customers Expect Their Problems to Be Resolved in a Single Session

What happens when a customer’s order goes missing? Of course, you do everything in your power to track it down, but are you set up to resolve your customers’ problems efficiently? This is a challenge facing most businesses in the United States — and you don’t need to own a company to understand why. When interfacing with other businesses, how often are your issues resolved in a single session? Are you put on hold? Or promised a callback? Customer loyalty is motivated by a number of factors, but nothing tarnishes your relationship with a customer like poor customer service. In fact, 4 out of 5 consumers have not expressed a notable increase in customer service satisfaction in over 10 years. If you want to retain customers, it’s time to enhance your customer service capabilities.

Web-Based Customer Service Can’t Replace Live Support (Yet)

Droves of companies have started to transition to web-based customer service; however, despite its popularity among business leaders, it has yet to fully win over consumers. Let’s face it, consumer challenges are becoming more and more technical as technological innovation continues to flourish in our world. Posting a library of help-related resources in lieu of phone support can be maddening for consumers who want quick answers to their questions. Live chats that aren’t overseen by a human employee are oftentimes even less effective. There’s still no substitute for a phone call with a reliable representative, but equipping these workers with the tools to succeed is something many executives overlook. If you want to improve customer service, you must not only diversify your customer service channels but also equip your team with the tools to store and retrieve documentation with the click of a button.

Businesses Have Little Control Over Customer Service Expectations

Unfortunately, your customers’ expectations of customer service are largely dependent on factors outside of your control.  It doesn’t matter whether an individual is purchasing a pressure washer for their home or ECM tools for their business, consumer behavior is relatively consistent. Therefore, customer service expectations can be elevated by consumer experiences on a personal level. For example, if they purchased a pressure washer online and it was delivered damaged, but they were able to solve the conflict amicably on the first contact, this experience could manifest in unpredictable ways — like heightened expectations for another company’s customer service capabilities. Even if you’re a B2B shop, customer service can be redefined by a buyer’s B2C experiences. What does this mean for enterprise executives? Consumer trends for the enterprise can be gleaned by taking a close look at the best customer experiences you’ve come across personally.

ECM Tools for Customer Service Can Help You Retain Customers Who Are Leaving

No matter how much data you have, predicting how consumers will act always require a little luck. You can eliminate some of the guesswork by fortifying your Customer Service department with ECM tools designed to elevate efficiency and serve superior customer experiences. Oftentimes, this is accomplished in ways your customers cannot see or perceive. What happens behind the scenes at your company matters, and by implementing ECM for Customer Service, you can ensure that you retain more customers by providing the level of service they expect — whether making purchases on the B2C or B2B level.

To learn more about how to retain customers who are leaving by implementing ECM for Customer Service, contact IntelliChief today.

 

Enterprise Automation Statistics

10 Enterprise Automation Statistics for the Cost-Conscious Executive

Enterprise Automation Statistics

Industry 4.0 is here, which means top executives are taking it upon themselves to equip their businesses with the tools and resources necessary to stay competitive and improve profitability. Although there are several ways to improve operational efficiency across the enterprise, there are only a handful of solutions that can generate appreciable ROI from the outset, and among these, Enterprise Automation reigns supreme. Are you still performing your due diligence on automation? These 10 Enterprise Automation statistics will help you obtain a better understanding of why the time to automate is now.

 

For business leaders, it can feel like the goalposts are constantly being moved when it comes to Enterprise Automation. Innovation is at an all-time high, which means new features, functions, integrations, and products are always on the horizon. A quick search online might yield dozens of potential vendors. Due diligence could take weeks, even months, to complete. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but that doesn’t mean you should stall your Digital Transformation; instead, consider these ten Enterprise Automation statistics!

1. It Takes Employees an Average of 18 Minutes to Locate a Document Manually

Before you can automate, you must first digitize. Digitization of your business-critical documents ensures that they are never lost or destroyed. They can be recalled on demand without a trip to the file cabinet or warehouse, allowing you to establish a frictionless work environment where productivity is prioritized. It takes employees an average of 18 minutes to locate a document manually, which can account for up to 50 percent of their time. When you digitize your documents, you reclaim this time lost and set the stage for the real game-changer: Enterprise Automation.

2. 60% of Occupations Could Save 30% of Their Time With Automation

Once you’ve performed your due diligence and identified your ideal solution, it’s time to identify which business processes are best suited for automation. When automating workflows, you want to zero in on departments that process a large volume of paper and/or information. In our experience, some of the best departments to automate include:

There is no “wrong” answer when you start to automate business processes; however, there are certain departments that will yield a higher ROI than others due to a number of factors. Here’s the good news. According to a McKinsey Study, 60 percent of occupations could save 30 percent of their time with automation, which means the potential for automation within your organization is largely untapped.

3. Employees Spend 69 Workdays Each Year on Manual Administration-Related Tasks Instead of Their Primary Job Duties

Businesses that automate drastically reduce wasteful spending by eliminating repetitive, time-consuming tasks that lead to productivity issues. In a study conducted by DJS Research on behalf of Unit 4, it was revealed that people spend 69 workdays each year performing manual administration-related tasks instead of their primary job duties. Enterprise Automation helps you reclaim this time and put it to use however you see fit. Can you imagine how much more your employees could accomplish with an extra 552 hours per year?

4. Businesses That Adopted Big Data Reduced Overall Costs by 10% and Increased Overall Profits by 8%

Another benefit of Enterprise Automation is that it allows you to bolster your analytics efforts to get a clearer view of the nuances of what is (and isn’t) working process-wise within your organization. You can identify operational bottlenecks, inefficient processes, and even track individual performance to make sure each of your team members is putting forth equal input to help you achieve your fiscal goals. You don’t have to wait until the end of the quarter to collect data and generate reports like the old days. You simply click a button and your reports are ready to view or distribute. Improving business intelligence keeps everyone in your organization on the same page and working towards the same objectives, which explains Business Application Research Center (BARC) findings that businesses with big data capabilities are able to reduce overall costs by 10 percent and increase overall profits by 8 percent on average.

5. Bad Data Costs Businesses $600 Billion Annually

Collectively, businesses forfeit $600 billion annually as a result of poor quality data. On a case-by-case basis, this can account for as much as 20-35 percent of operating revenue costs. That’s not a figure to scoff at. The Business Literacy Institute considers a sustained growth rate of 10 percent a year to be “remarkably good,” so if you’re currently losing 20-35 percent of operating revenue costs to bad data, the numbers suggest that your business could be trending in the wrong direction.

6. Manual Business Processes Cost Businesses $5 Trillion Annually

$600 billion in lost operating revenue costs will certainly catch the attention of any executive, but it’s only a small fraction of the revenues lost to manual business processes. Manual business processes cost businesses $5 trillion annually. For reference, that is $2 trillion more than the U.S. deficit for 2020. Of all the Enterprise Automation statistics in this article, this might be the most alarming because it suggests a significant window of opportunity for any executive who is willing to take the leap and automate their company.

7. 75% of Businesses State That AI Will Allow Them to Transition Into New Businesses and Ventures

Businesses that are no longer at a functional disadvantage can do more with the resources available to them. Growth is a key indicator of a company’s overall success. 75 percent of businesses state that AI will allow them to transition into new businesses and ventures, allowing them to expand operations into new and increasingly profitable areas that would be barred off otherwise. For growth-minded executives fueled by ambition, an investment in Enterprise Automation equates to an investment in a growing portfolio of future-proof ventures.

8. 84% of Executives and Analysts Say AI Will Help Them Obtain or Sustain a Competitive Advantage

Executives and analysts alike are keen on automation because there is still a long way to go before this technology has been adopted universally. In other words, companies that automate sooner than later can get a head start in Industry 4.0. Just think, how would your business look today if you were the first to invest in a mobile-friendly website, automated customer service, or paperless process management? There’s a reasonable chance that with earlier adoption of these technologies, many of which were considered big risks at one point, your business would be further along with its Digital Transformation and more resilient to business interruptions. According to Forbes, 84 percent of executives and analysts say AI will help them obtain or sustain a competitive advantage — which means there is no time to waste.

9. 67% of Businesses Believe Implementing Digital or Software Solutions Is Important to Remain Competitive

AI plays an important role in automating business processes, but it’s not the only solution for companies looking to streamline and cut costs. 67 percent of businesses believe implementing digital or software solutions is important to remain competitive. Some examples of software solutions that can help enhance the enterprise include:

10. Automation Projects in Paper-Intensive Departments Generate an ROI of 30-200% in the First Year

According to ThinkAutomation, automation projects in paper-intensive departments, like Accounts Payable, Human Resources, and Customer Service, typically generate an ROI of 30-200 percent in the first year. In Accounts Payable, where Enterprise Automation can increase processing speeds by as much as 70 percent or more, many businesses recoup their initial investment in less than twelve months. Forward-thinking executives tend to leverage these savings to expand their solution across the enterprise to facilitate a more connected, data-savvy work environment.

These Enterprise Automation Statistics Speak for Themselves, Only You Can Speak for Your Business

Are you ready to cut costs, increase operational efficiency, and future-proof your business? These ten Enterprise Automation statistics speak for themselves, but it’s up to you to be the voice of reason at your company. If your team is still entering data to your ERP system manually, shuffling through file cabinets to locate documents, or paying the same invoice more than once, it’s time to make a change.

With IntelliChief, you can preserve your existing business processes and enhance them with industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Workflow Automation capabilities. To learn more, contact IntelliChief today.

Automation Trends

3 Reasons the Enterprise Automation Buzz Is Building

Automation Trends

Automation was once viewed as the future of technology — then it became a reality. Today, automation has been scaled up and down to meet the daily challenges of organizations spanning countless industries across the globe. If you’re still in the camp that believes Enterprise Automation is just a trend, it might be time to take a second look at what Automation can do for you and your business.

Twitter. LinkedIn. Reddit. Wherever public discourse takes place, automation is trending in the @mentions. From 2016 to 2017, Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) performed a comprehensive analysis of 3 million social mentions related to “future of work,” such as automation and RPA. The researchers were able to attribute positive sentiment to the majority of these engagements. They weren’t talking about how automation would affect employment; rather, they were discussing the potential for automation to improve working conditions and increase productivity.

1. Automation Saves Valuable Time

It’s no secret that automation technology works faster than humans. It doesn’t need to “think” or “consider” letters or numbers before taking an action; instead, actions are taken automatically whether or not a human worker is available to push a process through to the next step. Automation doesn’t take sick days or vacations and it’s not limited to 40-hour workweeks or the costly constraints of overtime. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that in the analysis mentioned above, 30 percent of respondents mentioned saving time when discussing automation.

It might be a well-worn cliche, but there’s no hiding from the fact that time is money. With Enterprise Automation, you can assign menial, time-consuming tasks to automation so your team can focus on the things automation isn’t as well-equipped to handle. The days of manual data entry are over, and everyone is talking about it.

2. Automated Business Processes Yield Valuable Analytical Data

Still not convinced that automation is more than a passing trend? Consider this: 25 percent of automation-related conversations taking place on social media reference big data analysis as a primary driver for implementing automation. When business processes are automated, they gain the ability to automatically track productivity from start to finish, allowing C-level executives to glean valuable insights and make informed decisions on a rolling basis. No more waiting for the end of the quarter to figure out what went wrong and why. With real-time analytics guiding you, operational inefficiencies can be nipped in the bud to prevent your team from wasting time and resources that could be better allocated to other tasks or departments.

3. Humans and Automation Can Work in Harmony

Automation is often viewed as the harbinger of death for human jobs, but this is a gross over-exaggeration that can be quickly disproven by examining how (and why) automation is being used by businesses all over the world. The average number of daily mentions of automation has doubled year-over-year. During that same period, the number of daily mentions of robots and jobs has increased by a staggering 70 percent year-over-year. However, to truly understand why this bodes well for humans and automation alike, we need to break into the meat and potatoes of these mentions to truly understand their sentiment. Here are a few examples:

 

 

Needless to say, the automation buzz is building — and for good reason. The automation “trend” has taken root and it’s not going away anytime soon. Organizations that can work faster and more efficiently while simultaneously cutting costs and improving work-life balance for employees have already taken the necessary steps to prepare for a future where traditional working arrangements are no longer viable.

Enterprise Automation: Once a Trend, Now a Requirement

Before the automation trend really took off, it was considered a luxury for enterprise leaders who not only had the infrastructure to support it but also the growth capabilities to afford it. Today, this is no longer the case. Automation technology and software have been retooled to boost business across all marketplaces. From start-ups to enterprises and beyond, automation is a difference-maker the likes of which we’ve never seen before, especially for large enterprises that can benefit from an integrated solution across multiple departments and locations. The automation trend is here to stay, and IntelliChief’s experts are standing by to ensure that your automation project capably addresses your challenges and helps you become more resilient (and profitable).

To learn more about Enterprise Automation or to see our products in action, contact IntelliChief today.

ECM Solutions

10 Ways Enterprise Content Management Supports Your Digital Transformation

ECM Solutions

Although Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a sprawling topic with no shortage of interesting details to discuss, getting to the point can a serious challenge. This is largely due to the fact that Enterprise Content Management systems are capable of transforming your organization from head to toe in numerous ways. Today, we will keep it short and sweet. We are giving ourselves ten minutes to cover ten ways ECM solutions support your digital transformation. Ready? Let’s get started!

 

What Are Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Solutions?

The advantages of an Enterprise Content Management system can help your business gain a distinct competitive advantage. From the moment documents are captured and digitized, your business becomes significantly more productive and cost-efficient. Here are ten unique ways ECM benefits businesses:

1. Imaging

Document imaging allows your business to convert paper documents into a digital format. That means no more paper documents or paper storage to manually file through looking for information. Industry-leading ECM solutions can also capture and organize data from documents that have been put through the imaging process to eliminate manual data entry altogether.

2. Document Management

Your business deals with vast quantities of documentation on a daily basis, which means managing and organizing these documents is essential to grease the wheels of your document-related processes. Unfortunately, handling all this paper manually can reduce productivity by a significant margin. Some employees spend upwards of 70% of their time searching for documents. Document management eliminates restores productivity and mitigates menial tasks.

3. Collaboration

Teamwork makes the dream work, and it’s hard to find a tool that makes collaboration as simple and effective as an Enterprise Content Management system. With employees working together on a connected platform that spans your entire enterprise, you can say goodbye to accidents and errors while keeping everyone on the same page at all times.

4. Enterprise Search

Is finding the right document at the right time a problem for your organization? You are not alone. As we mentioned above, manual document retrieval is a time-consuming process that causes your most important business process to sputter and stall. Enterprise search gives your team the ability to search and retrieve all enterprise content permissible to them under your unique business rules.

5. Business Process Management

Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Human Resources, Sales Orders, Customer Service…every department in your enterprise relies on highly specific processes. You’ve built out these processes throughout the years, and, for the most part, they have served you well — but there is still room for improvement! With Enterprise Content Management, all of your content is organized, consolidated, and optimized to ensure that every department is firing on all cylinders.

6. Business Rules Management

Most businesses seek ECM solutions that will give them the tools they need to automate their most time-consuming, manual processes. However, before this can happen, you must have a firm grasp of your unique business rules. An Enterprise Content Management system allows businesses to program business rules into workflow to automate delegation of authority, invoice routing, multi-tiered approvals, and more.

7. Knowledge Management

How efficiently do you handle information and resources within your organization? Most businesses assume that they manage internal knowledge well. The truth is that most businesses have no idea how to gauge knowledge management — one of the many problems that can be solved with ECM solutions. Your individual workers are empowered when they can access the holistic knowledge of your organization, allowing them to increase expertise and better serve you and your customers.

8. Digital Asset Management

Another way ECM solutions can help spur your digital transformation is by helping you better manage your digital assets (i.e., files, videos, music, photos, and other forms of media. As long as you own the rights or have permission to use this media, you have a valuable cache of digital assets that may prove valuable for a wide array of uses. That said, if you want to get the most out of these assets, you’ll need a reliable way to store, organize, and retrieve them without allowing them to fall into departmental silos and, ultimately, obscurity.

9. Records Management

Keeping track of records is crucial to maintain compliance and avoid costly fees. Unfortunately, with company, state, and federal guidelines differing on how long to retain documents, managing all your records can become a tedious exercise in futility. This is where ECM solutions can help. Whether it’s accounting records, bank statements, legal documents, contracts, permits and licenses, insurance documents, employee files, or something else entirely, your Enterprise Content Management system is equipped with the tools to save and retain these records in a secure digital repository. Some ECM solutions even allow for custom retention rules, similar to the business rules we mentioned previously.

10. Web Content Management

If your enterprise relies on large volumes of web-based content to maintain operational efficiency, an Enterprise Content Management system can help you ensure that your team is connected, giving them the ability to create, edit, and publish content from a centralized database.

Want to learn more about the benefits of our ECM solutions? Contact IntelliChief today to learn how your business can leverage an Enterprise Content Management system to become faster, leaner, and more profitable.

4 OCR Advantages That Help Businesses Rise Above Their Competitors

Has your company implemented a plan to start its digital transformation? When you transition to Enterprise Content Management (ECM), you must also convert your paper documents into digital copies. But how do you do that? Learn more about the advantages of optical character recognition (OCR) in this article.

At this point, unless you work for International Paper, Kimberly-Clark, or one of the other major paper manufacturers, you should not be dealing with paper on a daily basis. Not in 2020.

When you consider the recent advancements in ECM and how it gives businesses the freedom to eliminate paper altogether, there has never been a better time to embark on your digital transformation. In your bid to streamline and optimize your enterprise, going digital is essential, and OCR software is the best way to ensure that all of your information is secure and accessible from a digital repository, even if its native format was paper.

What Is OCR Software?

OCR is a technology that recognizes printed characters. According to PC Mag, “OCR systems can recognize many different fonts, including those designed specifically for optical recognition as well as typewriter and computer-printed characters. Advanced OCR systems can recognize hand printing.”

It’s a flexible solution that can improve your business in a number of ways, which is why the benefits of OCR are universally lauded by the companies that have already integrated this technology into their day-to-day business processes.

How Does OCR Software Work?

OCR software captures the information from traditional documents and converts it to searchable data that can be recalled at the push of a button. It is important to note that OCR software is far different than a scanner. A scanner simply creates a digital replicant of a document, it cannot utilize the captured information in a purposeful way. OCR captures the document and turns it into a bitmap, which can then be analyzed using variations in dark and light pixels to guide it. These pixels are then converted into ASCII characters. Once the document has been captured, OCR software can read the individual lines and patterns that make up printed characters — even if the document is multiple pages.

OCR Benefits for Your Business

The advantages of OCR can help your business gain a distinct competitive advantage. From the moment documents are captured and digitized, your business becomes significantly more productive and cost-efficient. Here’s how OCR benefits your business:

1. Convert Paper to Searchable Data

Stop searching through cumbersome file cabinets for paper documents and eliminate the costs associated with both on-site and off-site storage. Digitize all your corporate content whether it is a paper document received in the mail, fax,  email, or something else entirely. Once your documents have been converted, a user can utilize search features to quickly find the information they are looking for without leaving their desk.

2. Eliminate Erroneous Data Entry

Data entry tasks are often time-consuming and littered with errors, and it is easy to see why. Copying information from one medium to another is hardly stimulating, so it comes as no surprise that this task is better left to OCR software. One of the main benefits of OCR software is its ability to quickly capture information. It doesn’t need to check and re-check to ensure that it has entered the information correctly — it gets it right on the first go with a very small margin of error. By preserving the integrity of the data flowing through your company, you can ensure that transactions are accurate and detrimental errors are mitigated.

3. Accelerate Document Processing Speed

Not only does OCR benefit your company’s quality of information but it also increases the rate at which this information is routed throughout workflow to complete the corresponding transaction. As we mentioned above, this starts with making the process of data entry more efficient by eliminating manual entry and digitizing information for instant recall. However, it does not stop there. Another advantage of Optical Character Recognition is scalable batch processing technologies that prevent your volume of invoices from overwhelming your processors.

4. Unlock Straight-Through Processing Capabilities

While OCR software can play an important role in helping your business become more efficient and less resource hungry, the greatest potential will be derived from the technologies that can be implemented together with OCR software to unlock straight-through processing. Straight-through processing, or “touchless processing,” allows your company to process invoices without any human intervention — unless the system flags an exception. That’s right. OCR is the key to Business Process Automation, serving as the conduit for data to be automated in the first place. Here is an example of how it works:

Documents are automatically captured from a monitored inbox into your ERP or line of business system, giving you immediate real-time access to any information contained on those documents. Then, using a configurable workflow engine, this information is matched to the corresponding invoice and processed. If something doesn’t match, it is flagged as an exception and an employee is alerted. In some cases, exceptions are reduced by as much as 90% or more,.

Want to learn more about the advantages of OCR software? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions backed by robust capture capabilities.

 

Enterprise Data Analytics

Why Enterprise Data Analytics Is the Key to an Insight-Driven Enterprise

Enterprise Data Analytics

With half of all companies worldwide using big data to help them make informed business decisions, the demand for powerful business intelligence tools is at an all-time high. Companies that are already utilizing enterprise analytics are finding ways to set themselves apart from the competition. Those resisting this change are beginning to witness firsthand how the competitive landscape is shifting – and how enterprise analytics is driving those changes.

 

Businesses that rely on intuition alone will never have the same level of insight as their competitors that allow data to drive their most important business-related decisions. Plotting your growth strategy requires vast quantities of relevant data sourced directly from your business. What good are models and predictions when the data being utilized to generate them is inherently flawed?

Enterprise data analytics helps companies gain superior visibility into all of their business processes, the employees involved in those processes, and the various uses of capital that fuel those processes. With real-time enterprise analytics guiding key decision-makers, businesses become more resilient and less susceptible to having their market share usurped by a more tech-savvy competitor. The insight-driven enterprise is looking to establish a cohesive strategy for both present and future operations, and enterprise business intelligence tools like IntelliChief are at the crux of this crucial component of digital transformation.

Business Leaders in North America and Europe Embrace Enterprise Data Analytics

Today, over a quarter of businesses in North America have already started using enterprise data analytics to improve business processes. A roughly equal portion of North American businesses has already launched pilot projects to catch up with their competitors. The other half of businesses aren’t currently using enterprise analytics, but the majority of these businesses plan to use it in the future.

In Europe, slightly fewer businesses are utilizing big data in their business processes right now, but the overall sentiment is largely congruous with that of North America. Soon, half of all businesses will be using big data to improve processes and customer relations, especially in industries like retail, finance, manufacturing, construction, and education.

The Benefits of Enterprise Analytics

For those (roughly) half of North American businesses that are already using enterprise business intelligence platforms to gather valuable data about their processes, the benefits of enterprise analytics are clear:

  • Improved strategic decision-making
  • Superior process control and management
  • Enhanced insight into customer, employee, and partner behavior
  • Significant cost reductions
  • Fewer errors related to manual data entry
  • Increased revenue

According to Dr. Carsten Bange, CEO of the Business Application Research Center (BARC), an industry analyst and consulting firm focusing on Business Intelligence/Analytics, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), “Big data analytics brings many benefits to the table, but companies shouldn’t underestimate the challenges involved.”

Namely, data privacy and data security are two very important issues that cannot be ignored as companies migrate to one of the available business intelligence platforms. Selecting the right vendor that will walk you through the process of implementing (and integrating) your solution within your existing ERP environment from start to finish is essential for companies who want to improve their technological infrastructure while simultaneously protecting their company against disruptions.

Are You Ready to Experience an Insight-Driven Enterprise?

Once a company has access to enterprise data analytics, they will need to select or hire an employee to manage the insights and their related initiatives (unless a C-level executive plans to oversee big data). For example, if a company wants to reduce invoice processing time in their Accounts Payable department, they will need to have an understanding of their overall processing time, individual processing time per employee, and the cost per invoice. Once this information has been gathered, additional training can be prescribed to the employees that are working slower than their counterparts or to those who are producing more erroneous transactions.

This is only one example of the insights gained with enterprise analytics and barely scratches the surface of what is possible with real-time analytics driving every key decision and mitigating the risk of the unknown. The insight-driven enterprise can capably identify wasteful cost centers, eliminate bottlenecks, and restructure in accordance with facts – not assumptions.

Are you ready to experience the benefits of an insight-driven enterprise? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions backed by robust enterprise data analytics.

Business Process Automation Benefits

4 Benefits of Business Process Automation in the Workplace

Business Process Automation Benefits

Automating inefficient, time-consuming products has become essential in every industry in the United States. Whether you are a project manager working in construction or an Accounts Payable professional for an enterprise-class manufacturer, automation can help you forge a path forward during one of the most challenging economic periods in American history.

 

According to a recent Harris Poll survey, Accelerating Automation: How Businesses are Adapting to a Post-COVID World, “92 percent of business leaders agree that to survive and flourish, companies must enable digital channels and process automation in the workplace.”

As a business leader, your reasons for automating your company will differ drastically from those of others. Some automate to cut costs, while others do so to help control the workload being placed on employees. If eliminating costly transactional errors is your objective, automation can help with that too.

Business process automation benefits can be a significant game-changer for your company. In this article, we’ll briefly discuss four benefits of Business Process Automation. Keep in mind that these benefits are NOT mutually exclusive.

1. Meet and Surpass Your Growth Objectives

At the end of the day, every business has the same goal: growth.

Whether you want to grow to generate revenue, to spread your message, or to give yourself the tools to make a positive impact on the world, the most direct path to your goal is through growing your business – and business process automation gives you an array of tools to do just that.

The initial cost barrier of automation can be a tough pill to swallow; however, just beyond this initial investment lies an endless bounty of opportunity for businesses that decide to take the risk. Ironically, the risk of not investing in automation for the workplace is significantly higher – especially if your competitors are already getting their own automation projects underway.

Once your competitors automate their companies, you must begin calculating the opportunity cost of your decision to not automate, including:

  • Stifled profits
  • Overburdened employees
  • Erroneous processes
  • The rising cost of paper and storage
  • Lost market share
  • A growing gap in the capabilities of you versus your competitors

After you have justified your investment with the help of an expert, you will be able to forecast your ROI and create a plan to help you scale your solution into the future. With your company firing on all cylinders and productivity elevated by as much as 90%, you can rest assured that your company will continue to meet its growth objectives year after year.

2. Reduced Time to Fill Keeps Productivity at Peak Levels

Whenever an employee decides to quit or retire, they will leave a void in your business process that must be filled with another employee who possesses the same or similar skills and knowledge to complete the job at a high level.

If that role is unable to be filled, the responsibilities of that employee will fall squarely on the shoulders of your other workers. An overly long time to fill can cripple productivity and create bottlenecks in your workflow.

Automation can help you eliminate issues caused by an excessive time to fill. Better yet, it can bridge the gap when an employee leaves for good. If there’s no other candidate out there who can capably do the job or a lack of qualified talent, automation can nullify the impact.

3. Cultivate an Employee-Friendly Working Environment and Improve Retention

As a business leader, you are not only at war with your competitors when it comes to dollars and cents, you are also battling over the top talent in your industry. If your employees report being overworked or overburdened, regularly being tasked with taking on multiple duties or a large volume of manual tasks, they could be heading for greener pastures sooner than later.

The competition in the recruitment market is one of the least talked about struggles facing all employers, but that does not diminish its impact. The best way to avoid this obstacle is to retain employees, and the only way to retain employees at a high rate is to ensure that your working environment supports your employees and is willing to make necessary changes to improve retention.

Here’s the thing: Shallow improvements to the workplace, like installing pong tables and vending machines, won’t actually help you retain workers. Bells and whistles are nice, but they won’t help your workers relax if they are constantly working on repetitive or menial tasks.

Business process automation benefits your working environment because it takes on redundant tasks, freeing up your workers to focus on more meaningful responsibilities or those that require some form of creative problem-solving. Workers that arrive each day with a sense of autonomy over their work-life balance feel valued, which means they are more willing to stay with a company in the long run, as opposed to employees who constantly feel anxious or depleted.

4. Unheralded Efficiency Drives Your Business Past the Competition

Companies that focus on maintaining efficiency across all areas of their business generally have a leg up on the competition. They outfit themselves with superior technology that allows them to establish streamlined companies that waste very few resources. Take Tesla for example, which is now considered the most valuable car company on the planet despite being founded in 2003. Not only is their product more efficient, but their entire business model is also structured on the principle of efficiency.

Efficient processes ensure that information flows in and out of your business without any interruptions, resulting in faster transactions and increased operational bandwidth. For the enterprise, this is achieved by forming a seamless integration with the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system at the core of the business (i.e., Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft Infor LX, JD Edwards World, etc.). Once integrated, business process automation software can help you reclaim the 520 hours per year lost to repetitive tasks per employee.

Your company can cash in these hours on new projects, additional training, and other important organizational benefits. Repetitive tasks that could be automated cost the US economy over $10,000 per employee each year. How many employees does your company keep on its payroll? How many “invisible” dollars are you really losing? And how do these dollars lost compare to the dollars gained after investing in automation?  These are important questions that should be answered with the help of an expert who has experienced implementing automation in the workplace.

Automation in the workplace can help you establish stronger and more resilient business processes to help you become an industry disrupter? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about the benefits of business process automation.

Why Your Company Should Consider Going Paperless

Information is the heartbeat of an organization. Businesses need to manage and distribute information related to all of their departments’ business processes. This list can be long, as it typically includes Accounting, Customer Service, Human Resources, Legal, Operations, and more) and may need to be compliant with Sarbanes Oxley or HIPAA. If the circulation and management of this information slows down or becomes ineffective, progress gets stalled, and business concerns start to surface.

When a company is working under a tight budget in a demanding economic environment, every technology-related decision is predicated on its ability to generate an appreciable ROI. One major cost area in companies getting scrutinized is paper-based business systems. Traditional paper-based methods for creating and delivering documents are fraught with huge costs, chronic inefficiency, costly errors, and offer little flexibility. Some of these costs, which can be mitigated with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Workflow Automation, include:

  • Paper and paper-related expenses
  • Storage
  • Labor
  • Capital expenses
  • Employee productivity
  • Business processes

Why Do Companies Still Rely on Paper?

Many companies keep old paper-based systems for two reasons:

  • They do not know how much they’re really spending
  • They fear negative ROI from implementing a new solution

Paper-intensive companies need to find alternatives to these methods to reduce paper usage and eliminate paper costs that decrease their bottom line.

Successful ECM Projects Start With a Review of Your Current Expenses

Converting a company from paper-based processes to digital processes can seem like it is going to be an overwhelming expense, but it doesn’t have to be.

Calculating an ROI financial analysis requires careful study of current physical costs (paper, toner, paper storage, postage, shipping, envelopes) and labor costs (retrieving, handling, and filing paper copies).

Forrester Research references the ROI of imaging, suggesting companies follow these steps before converting to a paperless process management system:

  • Create a formal needs assessment
  • Establish specific goals to be addressed
  • Know your costs
  • Evaluate solutions
  • Build a business case with a clear ROI.

When companies go through the exploratory process, they begin to discover the excessive costs related to paper and inefficient processes. They can now consider adopting a paperless process management strategy document to achieve long-term cost savings and better efficiency.

Why Going Paperless Is the Only Solution for Enterprises

The Gartner Group recognizes the components of Enterprise Content Management as top technology priorities for businesses.

An ECM system makes it possible to lower the high costs of paper and paper-related products, reduce manual processing of documents, improve business processes, enable businesses to scale their operations, and improve general efficiency in their organization.

Cost reduction from eliminating paper and storage for documents, a cut-back in operating expenses (daily time savings, eliminated rework, time lost looking for misplaced documents) are some of the benefits businesses achieve immediately.

A new paperless system can be added in stages, with a series of projects that do not require converting all paper documents and business processes at the same time. New processes can be added over time as a business grows.

Are you interested in learning more about adopting ECM and Automation for your business? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our award-winning, time-tested solutions that have helped hundreds of customers work smarter, not harder.

Clear Choice ECM

Why IntelliChief Is the Clear Choice for Enterprise Content Management

Clear Choice ECM

IntelliChief is the clear choice for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), helping you meet your ROI requirements while streamlining and automating your company. Users can create, capture, manage, archive, retrieve, and distribute mission-critical documents directly from their PCs, eliminating the need for storage facilities, fax machines, copiers, and paper files.

As the industry leader in Enterprise Content Management, IntelliChief helps companies of all sizes go paperless with a typical ROI procured within one year or less. IntelliChief’s time-tested methodology is easily integrated with existing ERP systems and business processes. In fact, as one of the only universal integrations on the market, IntelliChief is uniquely suited to help companies across all industries regardless of their existing ERP infrastructure.

IntelliChief uses its workflow functionality to focus on business process improvements, resulting in smarter, more powerful results for users. It is easily incorporated into existing business applications without any customization or coding. IntelliChief enhances business processes in numerous ways, including:

Integrates Seamlessly With Any Enterprise Resource Planning System

IntelliChief integrates with any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, providing users with document retrieval directly from the ERP application, and access to the application data itself. It enables auto-indexing and the ability to initiate the workflow process. As the most flexible integration on the market, IntelliChief can be deployed across the private and public sectors to enhance businesses over every type.

Helps Employee Manage Problem Resolution

A documented, electronic version of business processes expedites approvals, automating sending and receiving of files for reviews, along with other related operations. IntelliChief enters all documents in electronic format for easy retrieval and resolution so employees can serve customers quickly.

IntelliChief creates a faster process by electronically routing information to the right person to approve, then route to customers or vendors. The workflow engine helps gain better visibility of the entire business process by notifying employees where certain documents are in the business process. It lets authorized users focus on the task at hand without worrying about following up on requests or hunting for lost transactions.

Complies With Industry Regulations

The electronic trail available for authorized users guarantees compliance with industry regulations. You’ll be able to meet specific deadlines to avoid penalties. IntelliChief is designed for highly flexible document retention rules. These rules help provide detailed audit trails and security against unauthorized access and loss of records.

Offers Web-Based Access from Any Location

IntelliChief offers full functionality through a Web browser. It is available to all authorized users from any Internet-accessible location where there is Internet access. IntelliChief is accessible directly from a green screen, a GUI, or a Windows-based dashboard.

Brings a Wealth of Knowledge and In-Depth Technical Support

IntelliChief has helped hundreds of clients across all industries solve their paper problems and business process challenges. They have long-standing expertise and are industry experts who offer support for all types and sizes of businesses to meet specific support requirements. Support includes highly trained personnel, offering both on-site and live remote assistance to respond quickly to problems for complete resolution.

Are you interested in learning more about how ECM and Automation can help your business gain a competitive advantage? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about why IntelliChief is the clear choice for Enterprise Content Management, and how our award-winning, time-tested solutions have helped hundreds of customers work smarter, not harder.

What to Look for in an ECM Provider

Understanding the costs and return on investment involved in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution is important before deciding on a software vendor. It’s important to consider the following factors when choosing an ECM provider:

Integrates With the Existing ERP System

Finding an ECM system that is engineered to unite with your existing ERP system is a huge benefit. When talking to ECM vendors, you should insist on finding a seamless integration that will allow you to achieve your goals.

Once a system is put into place, ECM needs to be a seamless fit, ensuring that current systems function as effectively as they did before installation. Having documents stored in a centralized repository results in the merging of business processes and computer applications so information is stored in a high-quality digital format.

Increases Productivity of Employees

When choosing an ECM system, it’s important to assess how much employees will be freed from unnecessary work to give them the needed time to be productive in other areas. Imagine if your workers didn’t have to spend upwards of 90% of their time manually handling paper documents and keying in data. What other tasks could they work on to benefit your organization? The possibilities are truly endless.

Supports Compliance With HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley

Companies need to take into account external government regulations and internal security policies as a critical part of doing business in their marketplace in order for documentation to be accessed in response to compliance audits and requests.

Health care providers have to consider how to create high levels of security for HIPAA and place physical safeguards (such as access to certain users) and/or technical safeguards (password-protected files) in place.

For Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, ECM systems need to store company information in a centralized location. Find a solution where documents are easily tracked through the entire process lifecycle for responses to regulatory audits.

Offers Browser-Based Interface

An ECM system should give employees the ability to access the system from any location using a secure browser interface. This will increase your ability to do business remotely by a significant margin without the need for a dysfunctional, expensive mobile app. If you want unrestricted mobile content management features, a browser-based interface is the most flexible, secure, and cost-effective option.

Provides Solid Experience and Market Knowledge

It’s crucial to work with a company that understands the business goals and technology needs. ECM solutions work well when the vendor has worked with many types of organizations. An ECM vendor who has a solid track record, significant experience, and who shares their large knowledge base ensures success.

Gives In-Depth Technical Support

Look for a company that offers extensive support and will partner to provide fast and easy solutions to problems. They should offer traditional support offerings as well as remote services, to meet all needs. They should offer a quick resolution of any issues.

Ready to find out whether Enterprise Content Management is right for your business? Contact IntelliChief to learn more about how we help businesses justify their projects with real-world ROI examples using actual business data.

Decrease Unnecessary Spending

Decrease Unnecessary Spending With Enterprise Content Management and Automation

Decrease Unnecessary Spending

Staying competitive is a challenge for every business in today’s business climate. Innovation is at an all-time high, and if you fail to keep up with the trends sweeping your industry, you could find yourself at a significant disadvantage. Fortunately, there are two ways to increase your bottom line:

  1. Generate More Revenue: This can be a challenge. Creating new pipeline typically requires a heavy input of company resources.  You need to invest in training salespeople, marketing your product or services, and closing deals at a rate that supports your expenses.
  2. Decrease Unnecessary Spending: On the other hand, you can eliminate (or at the very least reduce) the types of unnecessary expenses that most businesses are completely unaware of. By doing so, you can free up capital to spend how you see fit or save for a rainy day.

In this article, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Automation experts at IntelliChief will cover the types of unprecedented cost savings that can be achieved when your company is running at peak efficiency.

Say Goodbye (and Good Riddance) to Paper

Paper and its related expenses are one of the biggest spending items for a company. Enterprise Content Management greatly decreases costs due to printing, faxing, storing, and otherwise using paper for all types of business transactions.

Replace Costly Physical Storage With Consolidated Digital Storage

Storage is an expense many companies incur for keeping paper documents. If a manual system requires the retention of paper documents, such as accounting records, for a certain number of years, the cost of doing business can rise sharply. These expenses only grow as more physical storage is required, as does the cost of retrieving these documents. ECM eliminates costly storage and consolidates all documents within your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with everything available at the press of a key.

Improve Working Conditions for Your Valued Employees

Labor is one of the largest expenses in most companies. Making copies, manually routing documents, and hunting for lost paper items is time-consuming, inefficient, and repetitive. Companies that can pass of menial tasks to automation tend to have happier employees. These employees are empowered by the use of electronic tools to search for information and complete customer service tasks with ease. Documents move through an electronic workflow system so employees make decisions quickly. Losing information is no longer a costly problem. Employees can collaborate to resolve problems and issues directly from their PC or mobile devices, in any location, working together at the same time for speedy resolution.

Bolster Confidence Among Your Customers

With a manual system, companies need to keep constant track of purchase orders, requisitions, orders, and invoices. Not only is it time-consuming but it also leads to important items falling through the cracks. ECM and Automation improve customer relations because it shortens the time to find information, produces invoices faster, and keeps employees updated for faster turnaround with vendors and customers. It frees up employees to go where they are needed, rather than continuously handling paper to get business done.

You can still receive Purchase Orders, Requisitions, and Orders how yo always have, whether it is a fax, postal mail, email, or Web; however, once these documents enter your system, they will be accessible on-demand whenever and wherever they are required.

Overhaul Accounts Payable for Immense Savings

With Enterprise Content Management, any authorized employee can gain immediate access to all Accounts Payable documents – purchase orders, acknowledgments, receiving documents, invoices, and checks.

A major advantage of using ECM is avoiding lost or missing documents and the costs incurred with a lost document — costing an average of $500 per document to replace. Other major savings by going paperless with Accounts Payable documents include lower costs for printing, postage, faxing, special delivery, and storage.

Electronically managing the Accounts Payable has many benefits:

  • Saving money by taking better advantage of vendor discounts
  • Saving money by using less equipment, furniture, and supplies
  • Saving money and time with immediate access to all Accounts Payable documents
  • Saving time with faster research, better organization, cross filing and matching documents
  • Saving time for employees because of higher accuracy, avoiding manual keying errors, and
  • Utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for quick, accurate search and retrieval of electronic documents

It’s also worth noting that these benefits are largely transferrable to other departments, including Accounts Receivable, Order Entry, and more.

Superior Compliance and Security…Simplified

Regulatory compliance for Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requires strong security and specific legal mandates for companies. They have to consider external government regulations and internal security policies as a critical part of doing business. With paperless process management, time limits for retaining documents are easily established. When documents are no longer needed, they can easily be purged according to strict time controls to limit any liability issues.

An Enterprise Content Management system provides security against unauthorized access as well as the accidental or deliberate loss of records. Documents are automatically stored according to company-designed rules and regulations.

Stay Safe With Industry-Leading Disaster Recovery Services

The Gartner Group concludes that two out of five organizations that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. The principal reason: loss of documentation critical to a businesses’ daily function. A paperless process management solution has built-in backup and recovery capabilities in the event of a disaster.

All business processes can be integrated into a Disaster Recovery Plan with paperless process management. All documents can be retrieved as needed from any location.

Want to learn more about decreasing unnecessary expenditures with ECM and automation? Contact IntelliChief today.

Projected Enterprise Content Management CAGR Suggests the End of Point Solutions Is Near

A recently published report by MarketsandMarkets™ forecasts strong growth for Enterprise Content Management vendors in all regions, indicating a shift from disparate point solutions to robust, scalable offerings.

 

At this very moment, countless businesses are inquiring about how Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can help bring them into the future. They have heard whispers of faster processing times and fewer errors, streamlined exception handling, and the increased capital that comes with a system designed to generate ROI around the clock. Companies are phasing out point solutions that have provided short-term relief for some of their most pressing issues and, instead,  opting to look into the ECM market, which can deliver on promises of scalability, interdepartmental synergy, and cost savings.

Understanding the ECM Market

The ECM market is defined by the businesses it serves. Although ECM technology is robust, flexible, and scalable, the sector grows in response to the needs of its existing and future customers. When businesses fail to manage their enterprise content, it can create significant logistical challenges. For example, individuals working in procure-to-pay are often tasked with working with other employees outside of their direct team. If information is unable to pass from one department to the next, business grinds to a halt.

Initially, solutions vendors are expected to cater to large enterprises to help them manage large quantities of data from multiple departments or channels and measure data to drive decision making. That said, it is actually enterprises that are expected to really push the ECM market to the next tranche. For enterprises, the benefits of ECM include unrestricted access to data, significant cost savings, streamlined compliance, and operational elasticity.

The Why Behind ECM Market Growth

According to a new market research report published by MarketsandMarkets™, the ECM market is slated to grow from $40.1 billion in 2020 to an estimated $66.9 billion in 2025. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the forecast period is 10.8 percent.

The report, titled “Enterprise Content Management Market by Component, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, Business Function (HR Operations, Procurement and Supply Chain Management), Vertical (BFSI, Transportation and Logistics), and Region – Global Forecast to 2025,” goes on to identify a series of drivers for the projected growth in the sector, namely:

  • Inability to keep up with high-volume transactional content
  • Growing expectations for companies to facilitate streamlined content processing for all information entering or leaving the company
  • The increasing need for improvements in tasks involving organization, categorization, content structure, workflow routing, accessibility, and more

The Automation Market Is Thriving in North America

North America is considered the leader in ECM development and market growth. Over the next several years, this trend is expected to continue as new investments fund new projects to push the envelope. Reliable, long-time ECM providers like IntelliChief will begin to experience pressure from newer competitors in the space, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. However, IntelliChief has the unique distinction of being an ECM solution through and through, ensuring best-in-class service and support that can’t be matched by larger corporations just starting to get their foothold.

Are you interested in learning more about the ECM and Automation implementation process? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our award-winning, time-tested solutions that have helped hundreds of customers work smarter, not harder.

Software Implementation

3 Reasons Why the Software Implementation Phase Will Determine the Long-Term Success of Your Automation Project

Software Implementation

Automating your business processes gives you the opportunity to gain a distinct competitive advantage, but all your hard work can be undone by an inferior implementation or a lackluster integration.

 

“Since the software implementation ended, we’ve literally never used it,” sighs an Accounts Payable Supervisor for a chain of Midwest manufacturing plants.

He sits back in his chair as his eyes slowly rise towards the ceiling.

“We purchased our current solution six months ago because it checked all of our boxes. Unfortunately, we have not had enough help implementing it to actually use it properly. That’s why we called your team.”

Another man, dressed neatly, sits across from him taking notes on a legal pad. “It’s just sitting on the shelf?”

“Well, not literally,” the AP Supervisor laughs. “But it might as well be.”

“Well first, let me start by saying that I’m sorry your business had a poor experience with your last vendor. However, I’m happy to say that we can help! We aren’t going to leave your side until your system is fully functional and you’ve observed an appreciable ROI. How does that sound?”

“Sounds like we’ve got a deal.”

When our Solution Engineers hear horror stories like this from our customers, which, unfortunately, is more often than we care to admit, they are flabbergasted. Whether you’re looking for a simple fix to address a single issue with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system or a robust solution to transform your business, it is the vendor’s responsibility to ensure that your purchase is not only integrated securely in your existing work environment but also generating the ROI your company needs to justify its purchase.

When it comes to automation, you cannot afford to waste money on an unusable solution. Comprehensive, industry-leading features are important, but not if they’re locked away behind a wall of complicated code. Therefore, it is paramount that businesses keep implementation and customer service top of mind when shopping for an automation solution.

Caution: Companies Purchase the Wrong Solution All the Time

Let’s face it, shopping for enterprise software isn’t easy. When you start your search, you’re going to be confronted with hundreds, possibly even thousands of software options, but only a handful of those will have the features you’re looking for. Among those, maybe two or three will be compatible with your ERP system or line of business application – if you’re lucky.

It’s not uncommon for a company to purchase the wrong solution. In fact, it happens more often than you might think. Sometimes, it results in a situation similar to the scenario described above. In other cases, a solution might yield positive results but fail to live up to its true potential or the potential of a different solution. There’s an opportunity cost when you implement the wrong software integration, one that can undercut your bottom line for years.

The software implementation phase is your chance to test your system, ask questions, train your employees, and ensure that you have everything you need to successfully automate your company. Here are three reasons why you can’t afford to make a mistake:

Reason #1: Seamless Integrations Require Intimate Familiarity With Your Core Business Processes

Most businesses are seeking a seamless integration with their existing ERP system. In other words, a solution that has been carefully architected by an expert who understands the vulnerabilities of the system, how to work around them, and how to get the highest level of functionality from the integration – but that’s only the beginning. Let’s set aside the technicalities of a seamless software integration and focus on what matters most – your business. You need to be able to answer a lot of questions before you can be certain that your proposed solution is the right fit, chief among them:

Can the solution emulate my core business processes perfectly?

 

At IntelliChief, our Solution Engineers are trained to answer this question, and because IntelliChief has the rare distinction of universal compatibility with all ERP systems and line of business applications, our team’s implementation experience is unparalleled. Here is a brief summary of some of the steps that must be taken for a perfect implementation:

  • Detailed analysis of top vendors, processing time, and opportunities for business process optimization
  • Robust testing and validation of AP automation with top vendors
  • Automated OCR testing using real transactional content
  • Integrated training using live samples in the actual working environment
  • Daily engagements to answer questions and address challenges
  • 30-60-90 milestones to validate independent metrics against testing metrics

Reading #2: Only an Expert Can Provide Evidence of ROI Before Launch

Models and statistics do a fantastic job of conveying what should happen following your software implementation; however, many businesses find that their results differ drastically from their expectations. It requires a unique talent and a gift for working within the fabric of a client’s company to guarantee ROI that meets their goals.

There is only one way to truly know whether your software integration can meet your requirements, and that is by testing it live with your authentic business data. This will give you an unrestricted look at how your solution operates within your existing ERP environment. You will know precisely what to expect on Day 1, ensuring that there are no unexpected surprises as you begin to work faster, smarter, and more accurately than ever before.

Reading #3: Planning for Future Projects Begins During the First Phase of Implementation

Another reason why the software implementation phase is a strong determiner of future success is that it gives you the opportunity to establish a long-term plan. This is one of the major benefits of a software partnership as opposed to a faceless software vendor. There are only a handful of vendors who offer this level of service, IntelliChief residing chiefly among them.

With IntelliChief, you can automate one department (i.e., Accounts Payable), reap the benefits, and then use your new-found capital to continue automating other departments. For example, automating Accounts Receivable is essentially the inverse of automating Accounts Payable, which means you can essentially double your savings. It’s worth noting that a software partnership with an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor like IntelliChief will give you the ability to scale your solution according to the needs of your growing company.

Are you interested in learning more about the ECM and Automation implementation process? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our award-winning team of implementation experts.

 

 

Automate Company

Ready to Automate Your Company? Follow These 5 Steps to Get Started

Automate Company

If you didn’t start planning your automation strategy before the end of 2019, you’re already lagging behind your competitors. In many industries, business automation is inevitable. Outdated processes inundated by years of stopgap solutions leave companies vulnerable when key employees depart the company. Specialized knowledge doesn’t always make a smooth transfer from one generation to the next, and that can leave you at a distinct disadvantage, especially during a crisis.

When you automate your company, you optimize your business processes and fuse them to the DNA of your business. You become faster, more accurate, less error-prone, and less vulnerable to business interruptions. You fortify business continuity and give yourself the ability to expand how, where, and when you do business. Best of all, your system continues to work when the office is closed, allowing you to achieve peak efficiency around the clock.

That said, one does not simply snap their fingers to automate a company. Automating processes with business automation requires preparation and planning. Follow these five steps to get started as you make the transition to the best version of your business.

Step #1: Make a Commitment to Long-Term Success

Most business leaders are understandably focused on the here and now. It’s easy to fixate on short-term success, but the long-term outlook for your business is the ultimate judge of whether you are truly achieving your objectives. A commitment to business automation is a commitment to long-term success, which means shifting your strategy and possibly KPIs to account for the adjustment. It can be a tough pill to swallow, but there’s no time better than the present to take the leap. Not convinced? Here are several reasons why you should affirm your commitment to automation today:

  • Reduce the cost of labor
  • Mitigate human error
  • Unlock remote workforce
  • Adapt to changing markets
  • Optimize workforce distribution
  • Eliminate workflow bottlenecks
  • Enhance collaboration in and across departments
  • Ensure compliance at all times

Step #2: Select Your Most Paper-Burdened Department

At this point, nobody needs to make the case for the benefits of automation – it’s a well-known fact. However, to get the most out of business automation, you need to take what you’ve learned and apply it to one of the most paper-burdened departments in your business.

More paper means more problems, which tends to result in an inefficient or resource-hungry office. These are the departments that cost businesses the most money; not because employees aren’t working hard, but because the outdated processes they are utilizing are simply no match for today’s more advanced paperless solutions. Commonly, Accounts Payable, Order Entry, Human Resources, and Accounts Receivable are the departments that can benefit most, both in terms of boosting efficiency, productivity, and ROI.

Step #3: Understand the Justification for Going Paperless

Before you can automate at scale, you need to go paperless. In many ways, eliminating paper is the precursor to automation. When you go paperless, you maintain digital copies of all documents in a secure, centralized repository that can be accessed by approved users based on permission level. This gives you the ability to access, review, edit, and rout all documents instantaneously, eliminating time spent shuffling through file cabinets or manually delivering documents. Unlike information on paper, information that is transferred into a digital format can be used in virtually endless ways, which means you can finally consider automating the processes that are holding your business back.

Step #4: Blueprint Your Business Processes

Now, it’s time to identify business processes in need of improvement. You need a deep understanding of your workflows if you want to automate it correctly. Try to avoid systems that try to force you to make sweeping changes to your existing processes. Improvements are welcome, but if a system can’t adapt to your tried-and-true processes, it might not be the right match. On the other hand, avoid duplicating a manual process using technology only because “that’s the way we have always done it.”  Change is also an opportunity to improve by challenging why things are being done a certain way.

Engaging a partner with knowledge of best ERP- or industry-specific practices can also help to re-engineer a process and make it better than before.  You want a robust product that can be “configured” to the particular needs of your business. Only then will you be able to fully realize the advantages of business automation.

Step #5:  Automate Your Company With Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Software

The moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. You’ve made a steadfast commitment to automating your company, identified your most overburdened departments, reduced your reliance on paper, and documented the nuances of your business processes – it’s finally time to implement your automation solution! We recommend avoiding point solutions that only allow you to automate certain departments or processes. A configurable Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution that can be applied to multiple departments gives you the benefit of dealing with a single vendor who truly understands the entirety of your ERP system and it’s connected applications. It also allows you to scale your solution on your own terms and timeline.

 

Are you interested in learning more about how business automation can help you work smarter, not harder? IntelliChief can help you automate your company to accelerate processing times and eliminate errors, giving you a distinct competitive advantage. To learn more about how we can help you plot your automation timeline to ensure that your business is protected against future interruptions, contact us today.

 

Contact Us Demo Request

Why You Should Go Paperless During a Business Crisis

There’s nothing easy about the times we are living in. The economy is locked in a downward spiral that threatens our very way of life, and the stock market continues to spike erratically from all-time highs to all-time lows leaving even the most acclaimed marketing gurus with little idea as to how long (or how serious) this burgeoning recession will be. As a result, every decision faced is magnified by the potential impact it could have on your business, employees, and customers. As a leader, you must be acutely aware of how perilous this journey forward is, not just in terms of how you manage business assets and human capital today but also in the uncertain future.

If your company has been affected by severe business interruptions, it’s time to cut your costly reliance on paper! When you go paperless and embrace business process automation, you can lessen the impact of business interruptions and continue to thrive during times of uncertainty.

Save Assets, Eliminate Liabilities

How do you define an “asset?” For many, an asset is any resource that helps improve their business, such as hard-working employees, intelligent software, industry partnerships, and virtually anything else that positively influences the success of their business. Assets should be protected at all costs because they typically yield a positive ROI for your business; otherwise, they wouldn’t be assets!

On the other side of the spectrum, there are liabilities that you should eliminate to benefit your business. This can be tricky as some liabilities disguise themselves as assets. In fact, one such liability is paper, which has been masquerading as an asset for far too long. What’s wrong with using paper to do business? For starters:

  • Expensive
  • Inconvenient to store and retrieve
  • Easily lost, misplaced, or destroyed
  • Long processing times
  • Heavily reliant on repetitive manual work
  • Not scalable
  • Incompatible with key components of digital transformation
  • Slows business growth

When you go paperless, you can cut costs without cutting employees. Let’s face it, paper only serves one function: storing information. On the other hand, your employees have unlimited potential to assist your business in any number of ways. And with business process automation, they can work faster and more accurately without having to rely on old, inundated processes that prevent your business from reaching peak operational efficiency. When you make the commitment to support a paperless office today, you are fortifying your business infrastructure for whatever lies ahead in the future.

Layoffs Come With Hidden Costs

Unfortunately, when the economy is in the gutter and morale is low, many businesses are forced to rely on layoffs as a short-term solution to cut costs and keep a business viable while the markets work themselves out. No employer wants to find themselves in a position where this strategy has to be used; after all, employees are a company’s most valuable asset. Plus, layoffs can do more harm than good if you don’t consider the hidden financial and cultural costs:

  • Financial Costs: accrued paid time off, severance pay, continuation coverage, vacancy, replacement, and other miscellaneous expenses that could cost you up to tens of thousands of dollars or more. Keep in mind that the average cost to hire an employee is $4,129 per SHRM.
  • Cultural Costs: low morale, lost productivity, negative employee perceptions, missing tribal knowledge, and other people-based issues that are difficult to account for and even harder to assign a hard dollar value. Remember, if morale gets too low it can be difficult to retain new workers once economic conditions have recovered.

Support Business Continuity

When a company relies on paper-based processes or is undergoing a period of restructuring, it’s going to have a negative impact on business continuity. With a full team, everyone understands and acknowledges their role. They perform the same (or similar) tasks each day until they have been mastered. Many of these processes, such as Accounts Payable, rely on other employees to perform their own specialized tasks, too. Needless to say, when a portion of these employees is suddenly missing, it becomes nearly impossible to keep the entire operation running at 100 percent efficiency. This is another problem that can be easily solved when you go paperless.

A paperless office isn’t constrained to the same limitations as a physical office, and with business process automation, continuity is never an issue. Your processes become hardwired into the very framework of your business, which means employees don’t have to memorize complex filing rules or possess tribal knowledge to perform their jobs at a high level. If you need to cut costs but can’t afford to miss a step, you should consider how you can automate your company to ensure that business continuity is never interrupted again.

Embrace Long-Term Business Solutions

Speaking of business continuity, when you focus on eliminating paper, you are essentially reaffirming your commitment to a long-term business strategy. A paperless future is on the horizon, why not be one of the early adopters of this game-changing shift? If you go paperless today and automate your company, you’re equipping your business with the tools to work faster and more accurately than your competitors. Best of all, with all your documents stored digitally in an enterprise content management (ECM) system, your employees can keep working whether they’re in the office or working from home. When supported by business process automation, you can even process up to 90% or more of your documents without any human intervention at all. Companies that have already taken the leap are posting 40 – 75 percent cost savings as a result. Now that you’ve readjusted your projections for 2020 to align with the ongoing crisis, factor in 40 – 75 percent cost savings and see where your business stands.

Automate Your Company

When a company invests in a paperless office, all documents are filed and stored in a secure digital repository where they can be accessed at will. An ECM system expands on this functionality by allowing these documents to be processed via workflows that connect users with varying levels of authority within the company. Eliminating paper yields several basic yet potentially significant cost savings, including:

  • Reduced paper use
  • Eliminate filing cabinets and on-site storage
  • Fewer office supplies
  • Eliminate off-site storage
  • Faster processing times
  • Fewer errors

Consider this: it costs approximately $20 in labor to file a document, $120 to find misfiled documents, and $240 to reproduce a lost document. Just think, a document costs $20 to file, but if it’s misfiled the cost goes up to $140. If it gets lost altogether, that price goes up to $240. $240 is a high price to pay for one single document. At that price, an Accounts Payable professional earning a salary of $50,000 would only be expected to process around 200 documents per year to break even for the employer. That’s not very efficient or cost-effective, especially considering the average employee processes 700 invoices per month. This further goes to show that employees are assets with a high potential for positive ROI. As for paper…get rid of it!

Go Paperless Today to Avoid Future Business Interruptions

Help has already arrived in the form of a $2 trillion stimulus package, but this a one-time deal and shouldn’t be viewed as a long-term solution.  As an employer, it’s important to understand that the true costs of laying off people rather than paper are vastly different. If you want to avoid future business interruptions and keep your business running when America goes remote, the first step is to go paperless. Then, once you have eliminated your reliance on paper, you can automate your company to realize massive cost savings that allow you to keep your valued employees and liberate them from repetitive, manual tasks. In the end, you will have retained a large portion of your assets and future-proofed your business for the next crisis, allowing you to focus on growing your business alongside the employees who helped pave the way.

To learn more about how IntelliChief can help your company go paperless with business process automation, contact us today.

 

How to Keep Your Business Running When America Goes Remote

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Landoll

Automating the Purchase-to-Pay Process

You have to spend money to make money, which is why Accounts Payable has long been considered the crux of an organization’s operational capabilities. Automating the Purchase-to-Pay process is one of the most effective measures enterprises can take to streamline Invoice Processing, improve vendor relations, and eliminate tedious, manual tasks. Below, we explore how one company achieved unheralded levels of productivity by automating the Purchase-to-Pay process.

Landoll Corporation Aims to Improve the Purchase-to-Pay Process

Landoll Corporation’s history can be traced back to humble beginnings in 1963. Starting as a small company with only three employees, Landoll’s founders never imagined that their company would grow to become a global leader in innovative product design for agriculture, transportation, material handling, OEM, military, and government sectors — but through hard work and diligence, it did just that. Today, Landoll continues to innovate by developing some of the most durable and high-quality farm equipment, construction equipment, and trailers available.

Over the last half-century, Landoll has faced many challenges in its bid for growth. One seemingly constant detriment to Landoll’s success was the manual, paper-based processes hindering progress in Accounts Payable. Landoll’s Invoice volume was astronomical, making timely vendor payments an exception, rather than the rule.

“When I looked at the size and scope of the business process that we had become entangled, I decided we had to develop a paperless business model.” — John C. Schmidt, Group Manager at Landoll

This realization began the search for a solution that would allow Landoll to automate the Purchase-to-Pay process. After multiple rounds of due diligence, Landoll settled on IntelliChief as their go-forward solution for P2P automation. Leveraging the robust Content Management and Workflow Automation capabilities of IntelliChief’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, Landoll was able to automate the Purchase-to-Pay process to save time and money.

“The point to be made is this — buyers should be focusing on the buying process and developing quality vendors with the ability to deliver products on time at competitive prices, not shuffling paper between departments and staff.”

Getting Started With Paperless Purchasing

IntelliChief was implemented to streamline Landoll’s Purchase-to-Pay process. This would be accomplished by eliminating the need for paper, starting with the purchasing phase. Here’s how it works:

  • A Purchase Order is created in the company’s Infor ERP application
  • The PO is merged with an electronic form that is faxed or emailed automatically based on the vendor’s preference
  • The PO is electronically archived in IntelliChief’s secure, digital repository

Paperless Purchasing Benefits

IntelliChief’s advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software client, Capture Enterprise, enabled Landoll to capture key information from transactional documentation. With comprehensive AI capabilities, Capture Enterprise makes all transactional data usable, whether structured or unstructured.

IntelliChief’s highly intelligent OCR software extracts data from all paper, fax, and email documents and automatically populates processing fields in IntelliChief. This information is then verified against the data stored in Landoll’s Infor ERP. This data is indexed and archived, as are the corresponding image files.

Consider this scenario involving Order Acknowledgements:

If a buyer gets an email response from a supplier stating, ‘We have received your PO and we will ship as expected by the requested date,’ it is considerably more efficient to capture the Acknowledgment in IntelliChief with the purchase documentation collection, instead of filing it in a drawer with the PO.”

Here’s how IntelliChief helped address this scenario:

“If a problem with the shipment occurs, the buyer can pull up the PO in IntelliChief and see all related documents and determine the source of the problem. When the vendor is contacted, all the purchase information is available to the buyer, allowing for a quick resolution. The same process is applied to vendors, quotes and pricing. Capturing it all in IntelliChief is a significant time saver.”

Handling Purchasing Discrepancies

When materials are received, the receiving documents are also electronically captured. The same processing occurs with Bills of Lading and related Packing Slips. IntelliChief doesn’t care what type of document is being captured, it captures all information indiscriminately and archives it automatically according to pre-existing business rules that leverage machine learning to get smarter over time.

Why is this important? It allows IntelliChief to connect receiving documents with the corresponding PO and any other related documentation. Without any manual labor, a full transactional record or “digital paper trail” is formed. When Landoll processors retrieve any document from this record, they will instantly have access to related documents — making the process of handling purchasing discrepancies a total breeze.  Read on for more comments from John C. Schmidt, Group Manager at Landoll:

“For orders to have items that were back-ordered or shipped incorrectly, IntelliChief’s workflow can expedite resolution of these issues in an efficient manner. When there’s a discrepancy in the Packing Slip, it can be electronically routed to the specific buyer. It’s very easy and cost-effective when compared to our paper process days.”

Schmidt also pointed out another important benefit of going paperless:

“In the past, we used 15 filing cabinets and a warehouse to store our purchasing documents. With IntelliChief, we have no filing cabinets nor are we moving any files to the warehouse. The square footage previously occupied with filing cabinets in the AP Department is now being used for additional, much-needed meeting space. Filing time of the past is now directed to more productive purposes.”

Before IntelliChief, Landoll relied on two full-time employees to manage the filing, searching, and retrieving of Purchase Orders, quotes, and vendor-related information. Now, these employees have been reassigned within the company. Instead of tedious, manual data entry and file management, they are making strategic contributions to the company.

Payment Scheduling Optimization

IntelliChief also assists Landoll with payment scheduling and scheduling optimization. Before IntelliChief, Invoices that arrived via mail, fax, or email would eventually be manually printed, sorted, marked up, and distributed by Landoll’s Accounts Payable staff. Every day, an average of 100 Invoices were processed via this method. The process was highly manual, resulting in countless wasted man-hours in AP.

Whenever a discrepancy occurred, an AP processor would send a paper copy of the Invoice to the appropriate buyer for resolution, stalling AP processing until it was returned. Meanwhile, an Excel spreadsheet was utilized as a log to track the Invoices requiring resolution. This file would then be sent to managers for review and approval — more manual work to increase processing time.

This highly manual approval process meant Invoices were being handled four to five times each, resulting in poor payment scheduling optimization and:

  • Late payment penalties
  • Missed early payment discounts
  • Slow processing times
  • Frustrated vendors
  • Manual processing errors

Finally, after an Invoice was approved and a check was cut, it was matched against a duplicate copy of the check and filed in the filing cabinets by vendor name. But those were the old days, and Landoll had no intention of looking back. Just ask Susan Slater, AP Supervisor at Landoll:

“Now, Invoices that arrive via fax are electronically captured and are routed to the appropriate AP staffer’s electronic inbox. Mailed Invoices are processed and scanned by Administrators, who then index them with the appropriate vendor and PO number. IntelliChief’s workflow process routes the Invoice to the appropriate AP staff’s inbox. Emailed Invoices are captured with Capture Enterprise, with email and attachments sent to the imaging database.” — Susan Slater, Accounts Payable Supervisor at Landoll

With IntelliChief, payment scheduling optimization is enabled with visibility provided through IntelliChief’s industry-leading integration capabilities. Invoices are now sorted to determine which ones to pay first. Attempting this with the old paper system proved difficult and inefficient.

This entire electronic procedure for capturing and routing Invoices helps speed up the process. It is essential to receiving early payment discounts, accounting for considerable capital annually.”

If there is a need to review past transactions or any documents associated with it, IntelliChief’s search function retrieves the required information by the vendor number, PO number, Invoice number, or any other relevant metadata.

Expanding Beyond the Purchase-to-Pay Process With IntelliChief

With IntelliChief, Landoll’s digital transformation had begun. Leveraging results from their P2P Automation, Landoll set its sights on expanding IntelliChief utilization to other departments, business units, and processes, such as its Order-to-Cash operations. Landoll has enabled everyone from Sales, Customer Service, Order Processing, Invoicing, and Collections to go paperless with IntelliChief.

Do you want to learn more about automating your company’s Purchase-to-Pay Process? Contact IntelliChief today to learn more about our P2P Automation solutions.

Streamlining Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash

Streamlining purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash processes is at the top of every organization’s to-do list. The P2P and O2C cycles are rife with inefficiencies that can be addressed with the right technology, especially when these processes are paper-based and highly manual.

In this article, we detail the story of one IntelliChief customer whose severe paper overload wrought internal havoc on their businesses, resulting in misfiled documents, lost invoices, and customer service delays. Their solution included:

  • IntelliChief Enterprise
  • IntelliChief for Infor XA
  • IntelliChief Capture
  • IntelliChief for Accounts Payable
  • IntelliChief for Order Processing
  • FastFax

Focusing on the Process to Improve Profitability

Here is the justification for this particular customer’s Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash project according to their Accounting Manager:

“We were looking to improve processes to save time and money and improve how we dealt with customers and how we did our daily jobs. Our ultimate goal was to find a way to improve the bottom line, to improve profitability.”

This company’s solution search party asked their ERP provider to recommend a content management and process automation solution. They recommended  IntelliChief on the basis of its feature-rich capabilities and seamless integration with their ERP system. However, a simple recommendation wasn’t enough to obtain project approval. For that, the CEO and CFO wanted evidence of real ROI, including reduced costs for:

  • Labor
  • Faxing
  • Postage
  • Check Stock
  • Paper
  • Storage

“Neither the CEO or CFO wanted to see any soft dollars. We were able to show there were big savings, which could be used to improve profitability and services, and those were hard dollars.”

Therefore, the first challenge was streamlining the Purchase-to-Pay process, from purchasing to receiving and Accounts Payable. When creating POs, buyers printed them, emailed or faxed them to the vendor, stapled the confirmation receipt to the PO, and put everything in a basket to wait for confirmation. This process took up to 4 hours (on a good day). Clearly, something needed to change. Here’s our approach:

Streamlining Purchase-to-Pay

The cumbersome, time-consuming steps were eliminated with IntelliChief and a new, streamlined P2P process was established:

  • A Purchase Order is created
  • An electronic copy is saved
  • FastFax (an integrated fax server for IntelliChief) faxes or emails the PO without user intervention
  • Order Acknowledgments, received by fax or email, are archived in the IntelliChief database and linked to the appropriate PO

Not only is the P2P process streamlined but all documents can be retrieved on familiar ERP screens at any time by IntelliChief users.

Before IntelliChief, incoming products had receiving documents matched against POs, keyed into the ERP, and filed. When invoices arrived in Accounts Payable, invoices were matched against the receiving record in the system. If there was a discrepancy, AP staff needed to look for the original receiving documents to determine if they had been incorrectly entered into the ERP — or if the invoice was wrong. Consider these remarks by one Accounts Payable Associate:

“If the purchase had been made by one of our other facilities, I had to call them to send me a copy of the receiving documents, so I could match, review everything associated, and find out what happened.”

Today, after documents are matched in the warehouse and a receiving record has been created in the ERP, the receiving documents are scanned into IntelliChief, eliminating the need for hard copies and ensuring they are digitally available without the need to send physical paper to Accounts Payable.

Innovation All Across Accounts Payable

Let’s break down a few ways this customer streamlined Accounts Payable:

Every Invoice Accounted For

  • Faxed invoices are captured via FastFax and archived
  • Mailed invoices are scanned
  • Emailed invoices are saved with the easy-to-use IntelliChief Capture application

Automated Invoice Matching

  • IntelliChief automatically matches invoices against receiving documents and sends them to an electronic inbox (“Matched Invoices”)
  • Similarly, invoices without a receiving document go to an “Unmatched Invoices” inbox
  • These invoices are subsequently matched manually or rerouted into workflow once the PO is available

“Previously, every day I had to pull up the folder and try to match invoices. That was a big pain. With IntelliChief, the invoices are awaiting electronic matching with the receiver, as if they were saying, ‘Hey, here we are!’ It’s a tremendous time saver.”

Prior to IntelliChief, an insurmountable paper trail prevented invoices that needed quck approvals. Copies were made by AP staff, sent to the appropriate manager for approval, and returned to AP for a voucher.

“When invoices make it back to us, I had to contact each person to verify they received it, approved it, and sent it back. Sometimes invoices were paid late, or we couldn’t take advantage of vendor discounts because we couldn’t make the deadline. IntelliChief now electronically forwards invoices or approval to the correct person. They approve it with a single click. With IntelliChief’s automated workflow, the company has put an end to missing invoices, delays and unachieved discount savings.”

When Accounts Payable wanted to pay invoices, Accounts Payableagain had to match paper documents. Associates could spend upwards of half the day manually matching invoices and checks to be approved and signed by senior staff. This meant manually searching through filing cabinets for correct invoices and putting them in a folder with the corresponding check.

IntelliChief saves checks as an electronic image and manages them in workflow. It’s secure, simple, and streamlined.

“IntelliChief automates our check production; checks go via Workflow to senior staff, and they can simply click and look up the relevant documentation on-screen and either approve or void the check.”

Order Processing Pains

The second challenge was sales orders, which flowed in via fax, email, and postal mail. They were manually routed to the Traffic Group for review and carrier information access and logged before going to Order Entry. Then, they were sent back to the Customer Service Representative (CSR) or manager with any questions or when a discount required approval.

Here’s what the Customer Service Manager had to say about it:

“There was no way to know where in the process the order was at any given time, until it was put into the system. Sometimes we had to ask the customer to re-send, which you can imagine they weren’t very happy about. Then the workflow-by-hand is a tedious process, having to constantly ask staff in various departments where the order presently is, and where it’s going next. It slowed our fulfillment.”

After the order was entered, an acknowledgment was printed, proofed, and compared to the PO. Once approved, a CSR made a copy, faxed or mailed it to the customer, and filed the copy with the PO. It was slow, inefficient, and costly. Fortunately, it was also fixed.

Order Processing Done Right

With IntelliChief, order processing is efficient. Faxed orders are captured with FastFax, mailed orders are scanned into the system, and emailed orders are saved with IntelliChief’s easy-to-use capture capabilities. Every single document is archived in the IntelliChief database.

Electronic orders are sent to Order Entry or the CSR via workflow. Once in workflow, the order is routed to Traffic and then to Order Entry. IntelliChief creates and saves the Acknowledgment, which is faxed or emailed directly to the customer.

“We now have only 3 people involved in the process rather than 7 previously, and we always know exactly where the order is. IntelliChief cut our order process time in half.”

When customers called with questions about invoices, CSRs had to request a copy from Accounting. According to the Accounting Manager, this was also problematic:

“Prior to IntelliChief, the invoice had to be pulled from the files, which could take minutes or hours, and then logged. The order history (original PO, any change orders, acknowledgments, and all related documents) is now electronic. We can view order status through IntelliChief and see where any bottlenecks are. We can see if orders are not being entered. Invoices are emailed to customers, saving postage, labor, and mailing costs.”

IntelliChief Provides ROI and Intangible Benefits

IntelliChief provides the company both ROI and intangible benefits. Here’s what they said:

“It helped decrease the stress level! Being able to really see what’s happening, to see where holdups are is incredible. From a management standpoint, that’s a measurable benefit to me.”

But that’s not all:

We can’t wait until next year when the independent auditors come in. We’ll provide them with a workstation accessing IntelliChief, and they can do document searches without involving any of our Accounting staff.”

Banking on a Paperless Future? Start With Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash

Implementing process automation is admittedly a procedural shift. But in time, employees, managers, and business leaders can all agree that it makes life easier for everyone.

“The idea of not having paper anymore for some people was difficult to overcome, initially. They now understand automation is a real advantage for all of us, with how we serve our customers, and everyone realizes the competitive advantage it provides us.”

Are you ready to eliminate paper and experience the benefits of Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash automation? Contact IntelliChief today.

3 Reasons to Automate Your Human Resources Department

HR Document Management

In 1893, an economist by the name of John R. Commons was the first to use the term “human resource.” He scribed the term into a book titled “The Distribution of Wealth.” Over a century later, it has become clear that this was a fitting name for the first text to mention humans as a resource because the Human Resources department in every business has become a crucial component in maintaining wealth.

That said, it’s really not until the 1960s when the idea of Human Resources became interminably intertwined with the individuals who are responsible for managing employee-related resources. The Human Resources department oversees everything dealing with the management of human capital within a company. They are tasked with managing all of the information regarding every employee within an organization. It’s a heavy lift, one made even more burdensome by a systemic reliance on outdated, paper-based processes.

When John R. Commons first penned the term “human resource,” it’s hard to imagine that he could fathom how big his concept would grow. Today, successful companies don’t just staff the most hard-working HR professionals, they equip them with Human Resources document management automation to ensure that every employee is accounted for and managed with the utmost efficiency. An inefficient HR department can not only create friction within your company but also affect your bottom line as your most important assets are mismanaged and unable to maintain peak productivity.

Why Human Resources Document Management Automation?

Being the hub of an organization’s resources, people, and the jobs they’re performing, the information contained within HR-HCM files functionally keeps companies afloat. Unfortunately, larger companies that have become overly reliant on paper find themselves entrenched by processes that become highly specialized (and less efficient) over time as impractical processes are utilized to “patch” shortcomings in an existing HR system. Plus, HR processes vast quantities of information, and whenever you have large amounts of information, you simply can’t afford to be running through reams of paper, too.

Before a company can take advantage of the benefits of Human Resources document management automation, they must first have a digital repository for all of their data to be stored. Ideally, using an enterprise content management (ECM) solution that permits workflow automation. From this centralized repository, all HR-related information can be accessed by users with the proper permissions. Such a system empowers businesses to take advantage of electronic employee file management, secure storage, remote access, robust file search capabilities, and more. Your employees will never need to dig through a file cabinet again. Plus, ECM solutions like IntelliChief automatically assist with compliance by creating a virtual document timeline from onboarding through its lifecycle.

Why Businesses Automate Human Resources

Some companies automate their HR department after they have already successfully automated another department, such as Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable. Others wish to free their workers from repetitive, manual tasks that take up time but yield very little value. While every business automates for their own reasons, the most commonly cited reasons include:

1. To Get Faster

Document management is a time-intensive process when handled manually. Accessing information from a physical file is a time-consuming hassle that is vulnerable to mishaps during both storage and retrieval. One misfiled document can cost your company over $100 in wages. This figure doubles when a new document must be produced to replace the original. None of these slowdowns occur within an ECM system, and with automation, only documents that fail to meet your tolerances are forwarded to a user for manual intervention. When implemented properly, you can eliminate almost all of your false exceptions and facilitate a working environment where 100 percent of an employee’s attention can be given to the task at hand, all but eliminating mistakes from your HR document management process.

2. To Avoid Business Interruptions

It’s never been more apparent than in 2020 that American businesses are not equipped with the tools to stay productive when significant business interruptions strike on the local, national, or global level. Avoiding business interruptions doesn’t mean dispatching your team to work from home when something prevents you from going into the office, it means sustaining productivity and profitability in the face of a crisis. This can only be accomplished when your team is equipped with the tools to access and interact with documents around the clock. Of course, automation allows your business to continue working after hours, but what about those documents that do require human intervention? Can your team access them when working from home? If one user is unavailable, can another user with similar permissions access the document to complete the task for them? With ECM and automation, your business is always prepared for the unexpected, allowing you to work through business interruptions when your competitors are sidelined.

3. To Save Money

“A dollar saved is a dollar earned,” and when it comes to HR document management automation, the cost savings can be game-changing for your business. Here’s where you can expect to save:

  • Reduced paper, labor, and storage costs
  • Fewer errors
  • Faster processing and onboarding
  • Less turnover
  • Automatic audit compliance
  • Hire accurately

Businesses save money because they always have complete visibility over the status and contents of all HR files, including:

  • ADA medical records
  • Background checks
  • Drug tests
  • Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data
  • Expense reports
  • FMLA medical records
  • 1-9 forms
  • Insurance enrollment forms
  • OSHA records
  • Payroll records
  • PTO requests
  • Resumes and employment applications
  • Reviews and disciplinary records
  • Timesheets
  • Training manuals and onboarding itineraries
  • Tuition reimbursements

Best of all, a scalable solution like IntelliChief can be applied to multiple departments, allowing you to eliminate inefficiency and financial pitfalls across your entire enterprise. Cost savings in one department serve as a model for potential savings in other departments, and scaling is easy because working with a single vendor who supports robust software integrations ensures that there are no compatibility issues with other applications.

Are You Ready to Automate HR Document Management?

As an employer, your employees are your most valuable asset. They provide the creative spark to help you solve complex problems, the persistence to ensure that your business is always running, and the resilience to help you overcome challenges. To manage them effectively, you need to support your HR department and give them the tools to capably handle all of your most important HR files. As your business grows, so will the amount of pressure placed on your HR department. HR document management automation can give them the relief they need to manage their time and output and ensure years of dedicated service.

Ready to learn more about how Human Resources document management automation can help your business gain a competitive advantage? Contact IntelliChief today to speak with an HR document management automation expert.

 

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The ROI of AP Automation

AP Automation ROI

To get your company on board with an AP automation project, you need to show a clear ROI. Thankfully, it’s an easy case to build. Cost savings typically average 80 percent – and most companies achieve a full return on their investment within a single year.

The Financial ROI of Invoice Automation

Invoice processing is the most common process that AP departments automate. And the justification is there: the costs are reduced from $14-$17 per invoice (when done manually) to $3 (when automated.) The time investment is lower as well: the typical cycle is cut from 14 days to 3 days with automation.

Lower costs, fewer late fees, and more early payment discounts are the norm – not the exception. That’s the AP automation ROI realized.

The Non-Financial ROI of AP Automation

Realistically, the dollar savings are most important. But there are other, “softer” savings that you’ll also achieve. Consider:

The ROI of Control: Automating your AP workflows provides additional control for everyone involved. Standardizes processes leave less room for confusion or mistakes. And contrary to popular belief, automation doesn’t remove Accounts Payable employees from the process. It’s simply a way to eliminate steps that consume unnecessarily large amounts of time. With AP automation, you are still in control of coding and approving invoices, and adding them to the general ledger. You and your team will just have greater visibility and insight into the process.

The ROI of Time: AP automation buys you time. You’re able to transform your AP department from an expense to a profit center by pursuing higher-level tasks. Consider what you could achieve if your expert employees were focused on finding and negotiating potential discounts, optimizing your payment schedule, analyzing opportunities, and proactively working with vendors for better results. All of a sudden, your AP department can start generating revenue for your company.
​
The ROI of a More Capable, Productive Staff: As your company grows and invoice volumes increase, you will be able to keep up without hiring additional employees. Contractors and outsourcing are eliminated from the conversation as well. The team you have now will become more productive – and can help you keep up with long-term growth.

We get it: automating isn’t an instant decision. You need to evaluate (and oftentimes, maintain) your long-standing processes. You can do exactly that with a mappable AP automation program. IntelliChief’s solutions let you keep your current ways of processing, but automate them for increased efficiency.

The toughest part is the initial decision. It’s hard. You have to make yourself do it, but thankfully implementation isn’t difficult. And once your initial ROI projection is achieved, you’re likely to see more anticipation throughout the rest of your company. Soon, they’ll be following your lead and asking what else they can automate.

Want to talk your business case through with an expert? Contact IntelliChief to learn more about the ROI of AP automation.

5 Ways to Make Your Back-Office Shared Services Center More Productive

shared services best practicesBack-office procedures are a challenge for every business. However, the larger the organization, the higher the likelihood of duplicated processes – and the higher the need for efficiency.

Shared services can help streamline back-office administration, offering a centralized option for accounting, HR, customer service, and other functions. That said, companies still need to optimize their model so they aren’t held back by common operational issues.

The most successful shared service centers don’t operate as any other business unit. (PricewaterhouseCoopers confirms this.) Instead, top performers:

1. Fundamentally Change the Way That Services Are Delivered

In the earliest shared service models, processes were consolidated to help companies capture the efficiencies of scale. Today’s approach, however, focuses on optimizing processes in the first place, eliminating redundancies, and implementing the newest best practices.

2. Automate Redundant Tasks Wherever Possible

One real-life best practice? Using automation to make time-consuming processes simpler. When there’s something that has to be done – but isn’t an ideal use of a company’s resources – it can be helpful to turn to technology. For instance, back-office shared service centers can use software to process invoices and approvals, making these routine responsibilities less of a burden for their employees.

3. Consolidate Technologies

Before turning to shared services, many companies use multiple technologies across different departments. But, maintaining several legacy systems is incredibly inefficient – not to mention costly.

In KPMG’s global business services maturity model, one of the key milestones for an integrated organization is “coordinated processes [and] technology”.

This tends to come later in a shared service center’s development. KPMG recommends doing so after the delivery model is consolidated, but before a company’s services are synced end to end. This allows organizations to get a comprehensive plan in place and then choose the technologies that can support their goals – not the other way around.

4. Continually Test and Evaluate

As is the case with any business model, failing to adapt can cause any shared services organization to fall behind.

Today’s industry-standard may be completely outdated within five years. For instance, Accounts Payable used to involve extensive manual math, while SSCs now have the option of relying on software to run their calculations automatically. Even if a process is currently working well, it’s important to remain open to continued opportunities for improvement.  Activities like manual 3-way matching, manual keying, and unit and measure conversions can be completely eliminated, allowing users to focus on errors and exceptions (which software can’t automate).

5. Drive Changes From a Senior Management Level

Transitioning back-office processes to a shared service model is no small undertaking – but the results more than justify the cost. Changing the status quo (and maintaining momentum throughout the process) requires CEO-level commitment, as it’s only after a change is fully implemented that the benefits start to add up.

Let IntelliChief Help You Optimize Your Back-Office Shared Services

Whether you’ve just started to consider a shared services model or are looking to improve upon an existing approach, IntelliChief can help. Thousands of transactions go through IntelliChief’s back-office automation tools every day, and we’re here any time you’re ready to start doing the same.

To learn more about the comprehensive solutions we offer for procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, customer service, and human capital management, contact us today.

Reduce Your Lead Time: 8 Strategies to Process Orders Faster, Increase Customer Satisfaction, and Improve Your Cash Flow

Your customers expect to receive their orders quickly — no matter how they’re placed or how much customization is involved. If you take too long, you’re less likely to earn their repeat business, and you can forget about a word-of-mouth recommendation. The bottom line: Your lead time is important, and reducing it can have a major impact on your business.

Of course, that tends to be easier said than done, but with a few strategic changes you’ll be able to reduce your lead time and optimize your entire supply chain, leading to more satisfied customers and a stronger competitive advantage.

Before you start to make changes, you’ll need to set realistic goals for improvement that take into account your current performance and the nuances of your particular industry. For example, if you manufacture made-to-order products, your lead times may be several weeks longer than a company that has a standard product line.

If you want to grow your business, you’re going to need to reduce your lead time. Here’s how:

1. Remove Unreliable Suppliers From Your Supply Chain

Do you routinely receive late shipments from certain suppliers? Keeping them in your supply chain could be costing you more than finding a different vendor.

A study performed by NC State University suggests that supplier evaluation almost always has a positive impact on a company’s financial performance — even when taking into account the potential cost of a transition.

However, if you do change suppliers to reduce your lead time, make sure you’re stocked up with enough inventory to last you through the changeover. Furthermore, ensure that your new supplier is prepared to start sending you products right away.

2. Choose Vendors That Are Closer to Your Warehouse

In today’s global marketplace, you have access to more vendors than ever before. Unfortunately, while chasing the best prices across the globe, you may end up waiting weeks for products to be shipped overseas. This not only makes your lead time longer but it also complicates the process of returning faulty or unwanted products.

Reduce Lead Time

One of the easiest lead time reduction strategies for suppliers is to give priority to vendors that are located close to your warehouse or manufacturing plant. And if you can’t find a local supplier that can compete on price, consider placing larger (but less frequent) orders from international vendors and keeping a larger inventory on hand.

3. Share Your Demand Forecasts With Your Suppliers

If you’re in an industry that naturally fluctuates, your orders may change from month to month. In order to keep your suppliers prepared for larger-than-normal orders, let them know that you’re expecting an increase in demand as early as possible. This helps to ensure that they’re not only prepared to handle an exceedingly large order but also prepared to do so as quickly as possible.

4. Bring External Processes In-House

Do you handle most but not all of your production processes in-house? Consider increasing your own capabilities so you don’t have to send your products out to a third party for completion. This requires a significant investment upfront, but the long-term savings (and the permanent reduction in lead times) generally make this a financially feasible option. Plus, you’ll be establishing your infrastructure for growth, allowing you to scale with ease once your profits start to trend upwards.

5. Automate Your Order Processing Workflows

Once you have your raw materials and are ready to start production, make sure that your own internal processes are up to par as well. Consider:

  • How long it takes you to get customer purchase orders into your system
  • How long it takes you to move engineering change orders through production and QA
  • How often the process gets held up as a result of internal miscommunication
  • How often orders get lost entirely

If your performance is poor in any of these areas, your lead times are likely suffering as a result. Automating your order processing workflows can help you get your finished products out the door more quickly.

6. Complete Multiple Processes at the Same Time

Certain processes have to be completed before others can be started – and there’s just no way around it. But, if you’re able to identify processes that different individuals can complete at the same time, you can increase productivity and reduce your lead time even further.

Improve Lead Time

7. Improve Internal Communications

Order processing is an “all hands on deck” process. If you’re not collaborating well internally, you may be creating unnecessary delays.

Let’s use order entry as an example. If there are multiple steps in your process that require input from several people, you could be spending extra time you don’t have to. This is especially true if you’re dealing with paper, which can’t be tracked.  Paper-based projects left sitting on someone’s desk increases your lead time, as well as the likelihood of lost documents.

Even though poor communication is a major challenge to solve (and often a symptom of other, deeper issues), manufacturers have several options for eliminating bottlenecks. One option? A workflow system that immediately routes order-related documents from one department or user to the next, while immediately notifying users that a project requires their attention.

8. Communicate More Effectively With Your Customers

So this doesn’t technically help you reduce your lead time, but it does help you keep your customers up-to-date while they wait for their orders. Since studies have repeatedly found that communication is a strong predictor of customer loyalty, it’s an important aspect to consider.

If you’re not sending out order notifications, consider investing in a system that’ll do exactly that. (Automation is a major time-saver here as well, with plenty of technologies that handle notifications automatically.) It’s a simple – and nearly effortless – way to set expectations and increase satisfaction.

Let IntelliChief Help You Reduce Your Lead Time

At IntelliChief, we understand how critical it is for you to keep your business running smoothly – and we’re here to help.

We’ve provided hundreds of companies with the tools they need to automate their sales order-processing procedures. The result? Less time wasted on redundant back-office administration, and more time to devote to sales and product development. Some of our customers have even reduced their lead times by up to 50 percent.

To learn more, contact us today, or visit our Resource Library to see the ways that other manufacturers and distributors have started working smarter with IntelliChief.

 

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AI in Accounting: How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Technology Has Changed the Industry

Corporate accounting has long been driven by standard policies and procedures. But today, forward-thinking companies are updating their processes through automation. Modern advances in AI have made accounting faster and less error-prone – not to mention easier to scale. These advantages are part of the reason why – according to Forbes – a number of routine accounting processes are likely to be AI-based by the year 2020.

What Tasks Can Be Improved With Accounting AI?

Artificial intelligence is already capable of handling several common tasks, such as manual data entry and invoice classification. But, the more intelligent that technologies become, the larger the projected role of AI in the accounting area.

Artificial Intelligence for Accounts Payable

For corporate accountants who oversee outgoing payments, AI can help streamline invoice approvals, exception handling, audits, and GL coding.

Artificial intelligence allows technology to process documents the same way that humans do (although these technologies rely on behind-the-scenes configuration rather than natural intelligence). Their algorithms make them perfect for collecting and validating invoices, as well as matching to their corresponding purchase orders and receipts.

In the past, AP automation programs were only capable of reading invoices if they knew exactly where each piece of information was going to be located. This made their application somewhat limited. But, today’s programs have become much more intuitive.

Thanks to machine learning, computers now have the ability to:

  • Recognize patterns
  • Remember data for future applications
  • Learn from decisions made in similar circumstances
  • “Understand” and replicate tasks performed by human operators

As a result, accounting technologies are becoming more effective at validating transactions, matching quantities and prices, and determining which transactional documents require exception handling.

Similarly, robotics in accounts payable can streamline quantity conversions and tax calculations using information that’s already in a database – no need for an employee to figure this all out manually. And, if there’s an invoice that needs to be reviewed by a human, workflow-enabled programs can immediately send that document where it needs to go.

Artificial Intelligence in Accounts Receivable

Automated intelligence makes it easier for accountants to manage incoming payments as well.

For instance, if a customer submits a single payment for multiple invoices or sends a check that doesn’t seem to correspond with an existing transaction, AI can search for similarities to help sort out the issue. As a result, accountants can correct problems much more quickly, without having to reach out to the customer for clarification.

Artificial Intelligence in Corporate Auditing

Every accounting department has to invest resources into audit preparation, whether they’re paying a third-party or employing an auditor in house. This helps companies demonstrate proper accounting practices and regulatory compliance.

What’s typically a long, drawn-out process (and an expensive one at that) can be almost fully automated. Computer programs can be used to locate sample transactional documents, and in some cases, even deliver those documents right to the auditor. And because AI helps errors from occurring in the first place, reconciling financial records becomes much less of a burden.

In the future, audits themselves may even become fully automated. As AI continues to develop, accountants may be able to rely on computer-driven risk models and the immediate detection of fraudulent behavior patterns. But until the accuracy of those processes becomes much more reliable, human auditors will still be responsible for manual reviews.

Will AI Replace Accountants?

For all the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence, there’s also an undercurrent of uncertainty. Corporate accountants – and the companies that employ them – tend to wonder how AI is going to change the workforce.

One thing that most experts agree on: automation is not going to make accountants obsolete. It will, however, have an impact on their day-to-day responsibilities.

With artificial intelligence systems, routine tasks that used to take hours can instead be completed in seconds. Behind-the-scenes preparation (like locating transaction records) can also be automated, allowing accountants to focus on higher-value initiatives.

According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (one of the Big Four audit firms), one of the top reasons that financial service organizations are turning to AI is their ability to help them innovate. With machines handling the “grunt work”, accountants can take on more of a forward-thinking advisory role. By studying trends to help companies make more strategic business decisions, accountants are able to create a new (and more valuable) niche that’s unlikely to be taken over by robotic accounting automation.

AI Tools for Today’s Corporate Accounting Industry

To increase the chances of long-term success, companies need to find solutions that are simple enough – but also functional enough – for their employees to adopt right away. (It’s also ideal for companies to ask their employees what features would be most important before selecting a system.)

At IntelliChief, we provide simple, intuitive automation software for routine accounting processes. Our solutions use artificial intelligence to eliminate manual data entry, automatically create and record transactions, and make audit preparation easier than ever. And, our AI tools integrate with the most popular accounting systems, like Oracle and SAP. This makes it simple to improve upon your corporate accounting workflows, without having to completely overhaul your approach.

To learn more about how companies have transformed their accounting departments with AI – and more importantly, how you can do the same – contact us today.

Reducing Business Process Costs With Workflow Automation

When performed manually, business process costs are considerable.

While companies realize these costs exist, it’s hard to precisely calculate the number of employee work hours that factor into a process that needs refinement.

For those that do manage to equate hours with dollar amounts, the idea of automating these processes with Workflow Automation starts to look more and more appealing.

Example: Accounts Payable Costs

Accounts Payable is an area with telling industry averages.

Manual, paper-based AP departments need 14.6 days to process a supplier’s invoice at a cost of $16.91 per invoice.

On the other hand, companies with AP Automation are able to reduce processing time to 2.9 days at a cost of $3.47 per invoice.

Therefore, companies that automate Accounts Payable are processing invoices approximately 80 percent faster and for 80 percent the cost of those that rely on manual, paper-based business processes.

Reducing Business Process Costs by 30 Percent Across the Enterprise

Accounts Payable is a great example, but it’s far from the only area of your business that can benefit from Workflow Automation. Nearly any manual process can be made faster, less expensive, and more resilient to human error with automation.

Deloitte even estimates that Workflow Automation can reduce general business process costs by 30 percent. This takes into account staff and time savings as well as accuracy improvements.

Underlying contributors?

  • Documents are kept organized, accessible, and trackable throughout process lifecycles
  • Routing is automated, so processes endure fewer “stop and go” delays
  • Human error is eliminated by automating repeatable processes
  • Processing errors are prevented by allowing workers to focus solely on problematic exceptions

When Should a Company Transition to Automated Business Processes?

PricewaterhouseCoopers notes that Workflow Automation makes the most sense in companies that perform repetitive processes with high frequency. Thanks to economies of scale, automating each consecutive process becomes faster and cheaper with time.

This particularly resonates with large organizations, where — after a few department-specific implementations — it becomes economically feasible to optimize multiple processes company-wide. By expanding the solution throughout the entire business, companies can increase ROI and provide better customer experiences at every touchpoint.

Considerations for Reducing Business Process Costs

One major thing to keep in mind when you invest in an automation solution, especially if you’re planning to use it across your entire enterprise, it will need to integrate with all of your legacy IT systems. It’s ideal to automate processes while keeping existing front- and back-office systems in place as this will help you overcome the need for a complex infrastructure transformation. But not all solutions are designed to do so.

To that end, things to consider when choosing a workflow management software solution include:

  1. Ensure that your selected vendor has system functionalities and business process expertise that meet your company-wide requirements
  2. Consider processing capabilities for high volumes of data, across multiple departments
  3. Verify that your own business case is solid; work with the provider’s staff consultants to project the ROI of your automation project ahead of time
  4. Engage your vendor to assist with Change Management; they should be able to establish and implement a plan to help your staff function productively in their new environment.

When you choose the right solution, Workflow Automation can show quick results. For most projects, implementation is done in small steps by converting one process at a time into an automated workflow. It’s important to customize business rules for each department’s functional need, which can take time, but when done correctly, it can absolutely help companies cut costs, become more competitive, and optimize their most commonly performed processes.

If you’re ready to reach a superior level of operational excellence in terms of processing speed, costs and adaptability, contact IntelliChief. We have extensive experience automating workflows across AP, Finance, Order Processing, HR, and other departments. Our Enterprise Content Management software links your systems and streamlines disparate processes. We’d be happy to do the same for you.

How to Achieve Your Sales Order Processing Goals

What we all strive to achieve in sales order processing optimization:

  1. Having more orders to fill
  2. Having accurate information to work on, right from the get-go
  3. Having a lower order processing cost, faster fulfillment cycle, and more competitive DSO

Enterprise content management (ECM) software helps you achieve all of these (and more).

How ECM Lets You Optimize Your Sales Order Processing Procedure

ECM is just a way to store your documents…right?

WRONG.

It’s actually a comprehensive way to optimize the entire front end of your order fulfillment process.

For example, IntelliChief Capture Enterprise for Sales Orders lets you automate the entire processing environment for your inbound customer purchase orders.

Any PO received via email, fax, or as hard copy documents are imported into Capture Enterprise for processing. The software pulls order information from the header, body, and footer of the PO then verifies it with the data in your ERP. It leverages database lookups, defined business rules, calculations, and confidence thresholds to streamline the entire process from start to finish.

Once the order is validated, IntelliChief creates an official sales order in your ERP without requiring any manual data entry.

Meeting Your Order Processing Goals

If your fulfillment department has internal goals to meet, IntelliChief can help. It lets you:

  • Confirm the accuracy of each line item and price
  • Confirm that each product is in stock, and can be delivered on the requested data
  • Automatically alert you to orders that cannot be processed due to inaccuracies on the purchase order, delivery challenges, credit holds, or issues with the customer’s status
  • Ship orders more quickly (no more processing delays)

And, because you’re not manually entering each order into your system, you can spend that time focusing on more important initiatives. You can view and immediately address backlogs thanks to analytics, and proactively work to avoid customer satisfaction issues.

It’s achievable sales order processing optimization — and it all starts with IntelliChief.

To learn more about improving accuracy in your fulfillment department, while reducing cost and DSOs, contact IntelliChief today.

Improving Your Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

Your order to cash cycle determines how quickly you process your orders, how soon you get paid, and how much money you can re-invest in your business. A long cycle is a sign that you’re not operating as efficiently as possible. This can be frustrating – especially if you’re already using Oracle to manage your workflows. But with a few strategic changes, you can produce better metrics. One way to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Order entry and sales order processing automation, made possible by IntelliChief.

Oracle Order to Cash Overview

Any processes that occur after a customer has sent a purchase order fall under the “order to cash” umbrella.

Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

In Oracle, the order to cash cycle starts when you enter a new transaction into your Order Management Sales Order module. At this point, you can also:

  • Enter custom pricing and tax information
  • Apply discounts
  • Update a customer’s payment information
  • Update a customer’s shipment information

As you move from order entry to order fulfillment, you’ll also move to the Shipping Execution module. You’ll:

  • Put the requested items on hold
  • Create a pack slip
  • Set departure dates
  • Set up secondary shipments for backordered items
  • Calculate weight, volume, and fill percentages for your logistics team
  • Assign freight charges
  • Define container details

Once the order has shipped, Oracle notifies your customer. You can then use the Order Management module to track the delivery and manage returns.

Billing, which is done in Oracle Receivables, is the last step of the order to cash cycle. You can use the Receipts Workbench, Transactions Workbench, and Collections Workbench for the final O2C workflows. In these modules, you’ll enter receipts, create and send invoices, post payments, and add transactions to your general ledger.

Automating Key Steps in Your Oracle Order to Cash Process Flow

With so many steps to complete, it’s easy see where delays can occur. Many companies have issues routing orders and receipts from one department to the next. This is especially true for complex orders that move through Engineering, R&D, and Quality before they’re eventually sent out.

While you can’t automate the entire order to cash cycle in Oracle, you can streamline the most time- and labor-intensive steps. In fact, you can even have certain processes completed without any input from your employees. For example, you can have IntelliChief send new orders straight to Credit without Customer Service having to manually pass them along.

Our order to cash solutions communicate behind the scenes with your Oracle ERP. In doing so, our system can automatically:

Oracle O2C Automation Software

With IntelliChief, you’re able to keep your existing workflows in place. For instance, you can have your customers continue emailing, faxing, and mailing you their orders. But, with automation helping you out, you can avoid the routine administrative work that’s needed to move each order through to completion.

For O2C processes that do need a user’s attention, automatic notifications also make sure nothing falls through the cracks. When nobody is stuck wondering what they’re supposed to be doing, your orders are completed faster and with fewer mistakes.

Benefits of an Automated Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

Automating your Oracle workflows with IntelliChief helps you significantly reduce your order to cash cycle times. You can start processing each order right away, instead of waiting for a customer service member to enter them in. And, you can send invoices as soon as an order is complete, avoiding collection delays that complicate your cash flow.

Automation also helps you scale your order to cash processes without having to hire new employees. The teams you already have in place can take on new (and more valuable) work as well.

Another benefit: any time you need a document while you’re working in Oracle, you can retrieve it through IntelliChief. You don’t have to switch over to a different screen, helping reduce disruptions so that you can stay productive. Similarly, when customers reach out with questions, you can access their entire order history directly from your app. Customer service becomes much faster and less of a burden.

Discover IntelliChief’s O2C Solutions for Oracle

IntelliChief is designed as an end-to-end O2C solution. This means that you can use it to streamline as much of the process as you like. You can start with one specific area – like sales order management. Or, you can automate the entire Oracle order to cash process all at once. And, with the detailed reports that IntelliChief collects, you can visualize key ways to improve operations throughout your entire organization. This includes everything from supply chain management to inventory management.

Ready to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Our experts can review your O2C workflows and introduce you to our Oracle document management solutions. We’ve helped countless E-Business Suite users just like you leverage the power of automation – and we’ll use that extensive technical knowledge to your benefit throughout implementation and beyond.

To learn more about how you can improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle, contact IntelliChief today. We also offer customized demos tailored to the needs of your business. To request a free demo, click here.

 

AP Automation Cost Savings

AP Automation Cost Savings

You know that Accounts Payable automation cost savings can make a major impact on your business – but do you know just how major?

Let’s talk numbers.

On average, companies with a manual, paper-based AP environment require 14.6 days to process a supplier’s invoice. It cost them $16.91 to do so.

In contrast:

Companies that use AP automation can process an invoice in just 2.9 days — at a mere $3.47 per invoice.

The Hard Dollar and Soft Dollar Savings of Accounts Payable Automation

Here are the quantifying elements.

When you eliminate manual invoice processing, there are several things that directly reduce your expenses. It’s often a combination of:

  • Better business processes
  • High-ROI technologies
  • Simplified internal policies

Though hard dollar savings are easier to calculate, don’t ignore the soft dollars. Soft dollar savings help you reduce costs through:

  • More strategically allocated labor resources
  • Greater efficiency
  • Productivity gains
  • More actionable strategic information
  • Proactive compliance
  • A more rewarding work environment/decreased staff turnover

These savings (and competitive advantages) extend to many different activities throughout your organization. Here’s a breakdown:

Staff Resources, Time, and Cost Involved with Manual Invoice Processing

Here are calculations that can help you quantify the true cost of AP processing:

Task                                           # of People      % of Time        Salary              Total Cost
Opening & Sorting Invoices         1 Person             20%                 $45,000             $9,000

If it takes 1 person 20% of their time to open and sort incoming invoices mailed, emailed (then printed), and faxed, and they are being paid $45,000 annually, the cost to open and sort is $9,000.

Task                                         # of People      % of Time        Salary              Total Cost
Manually Keying Invoices       2 People              60%                 $45,000             $54,000

If it takes 2 people 60% of their time to key invoices into ERP and accounting systems, with an annual salary of $45,000 each, the cost to manually enter invoice information is $54,000.

Task                                          # of People      % of Time        Salary              Total Cost
Filing Paper Invoices                 1 Person             40%                  $35,000             $14,000

If it takes 1 person 40% of their time to file paid invoices into the paper filing storage onsite, and their compensation’s $35,000 annually, the cost to manual invoice filing is $14,000.

The Total Bill: $77,000

Add these costs together, and this small Accounts Payable department costs a company $77,000 in a year. And these costs increase rapidly as more transactions are processed (and more resources are utilized)

More AP Cost Statistics

Other things you should know:

  • Companies that process invoices manually report an error rate of 4 percent.
  • 62 percent of invoice processing costs represent staff labor.
  • Only 30 percent of companies use automatic capture to help with AP invoice processing.
  • 50 percent of early payment discounts go unobtained, as companies struggle to execute payment in time.
  • Only 32 percent of companies monitor and analyze the performance of their AP department.

One final takeaway – and perhaps the most important: Accounts Payable automation has the potential to reduce processing costs by as much as 80 percent.

If you’re ready to realize the benefits of AP automation cost savings, IntelliChief is here to help. Contact us today for a personalized plan.

How to Organize Your Accounts Payable Files

Switch to Electronic File Storage

For most companies, managing the immense amount of paperwork required to keep a business running is a daily challenge. If your Accounts Payable department has grown accustomed to missed deadlines, lost early payment discounts, and unnecessary stress, it might be time to look for a solution that helps your team work smarter, not harder. However, in order to do so, you will first need to figure out how to organize your Accounts Payable files in a way that works for you.

On-Site, Off-Site, and Electronic File Storage

In most cases, businesses have three main options to organize Accounts Payable files:

On-Site File Storage

This is the most straightforward approach. You can designate a single storage area for all your accounts payable files, or you can have each employee maintain the files that they’re responsible for at their own workstation. Of course, you have to take security into account, making sure that unauthorized employees can’t access your company’s financial information. You also need to keep track of who is viewing your files and when.

The upside is that you can organize your files in any way that makes sense for you. Some companies match each invoice with the corresponding purchase order, receipt, and payment. This is typically the best approach when it comes to two- and three-way matching. Other companies organize their documents by vendor, date of payment, or date of receipt. But, whichever option you choose, know that it may still take quite a while to locate specific documents when you need to process them.

Off-Site File Storage

With off-site storage, you don’t have to find the space in your office for file after file – and you don’t have to create an organizational structure from scratch. But, you do have to budget for the (often significant) expense of storage.

You also have to trust that your vendor can quickly find the documents you need, right when you need them. It’s not uncommon for documents to get lost in the shuffle – and few things are more frustrating than having to hit pause on your workflows while you request a replacement.

Electronic File Storage

Electronic file management allows you to access your documents at a moment’s notice, without having to deal with the physical clutter. It does represent a significant up-front investment, but it lets you keep your documents organized without any effort. In fact, you can search by almost any criteria (for instance, if you don’t remember the account number or customer name, you can perform a lookup by date) – and you don’t even have to leave your desk. And when you need to collaborate, you can instantly send a document to another member of your team – even if they’re in a different office or working remotely.

Another important thing to keep in mind: no matter which option you choose, you’ll need to put a process in place for getting rid of files once they’re no longer needed. (This is especially important in public companies needing to maintain compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations.) With on- and off-site storage, you can create a calendar and have an employee actively monitor it, although this method can be error-prone. Electronic archives, on the other hand, can be configured to permanently delete sensitive data once it’s no longer needed, making lifecycle management a snap.

Discover IntelliChief’s Enterprise Content Management System

Still not sure how to organize your accounts payable files? IntelliChief can help. Our accounts payable software has helped countless companies say goodbye to paperwork once and for all. You can set custom user permissions, create audit logs, and collaborate across multiple departments with the click of a button. Our software is designed to integrate seamlessly with any ERP system or line of business application, allowing your business to benefit from immediate improvements to processing speed and accuracy.

To learn more about how to organize your Accounts Payable files with IntelliChief, contact us today.

 

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5 ECM Benefits You Can Achieve Within a Year

If you’re considering an enterprise content management system, you probably have an idea of what it can do for your business. But have you wondered just how quickly you’ll start to see a change? Companies usually see the benefits of ECM starting on day one – and continue to enjoy them well into the future. Keep reading to discover five advantages that you can expect to achieve within a year of implementing an enterprise content management system.

(Note: for the examples below, we’re assuming implementation across Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Order Processing. The more processes you automate, the more benefits you’ll see.)

Benefit #1: Lower Processing Costs

ECM BenefitsProcessing an invoice takes quite a bit of time – and therefore, quite a bit of money. For most organizations, a salaried AP employee has to collect, sort, and distribute paper invoices, bring them to the appropriate individuals for processing or approval, and key them into an ERP. These are all routine, low-value tasks, but they must be completed.

ECM software can handle most – if not all – of this process without an employee’s input. This makes the process much more affordable.

A study from the Aberdeen Group found that the most advanced companies – presumably including those that used software to automate the process – spent just $3.09 to process an invoice. In contrast, companies that had no solutions in place were spending an average of $38.77. Saving around $35 per invoice processed is no small sum – especially when you consider the impact of thousands of invoices per month.

Benefit #2: Increased Accuracy

Here too, we see how manual invoice processing can hold a company back. When AP clerks have to type out all the information on an invoice, it’s easy to key the wrong number (or address, or vendor name…you get the idea.) That invoice will eventually get identified as incorrect, and someone has to take the time to find (and resolve) the error. That’s not just inconvenient; it can prevent you from paying your invoice on time, which can, in turn, prevent you from capitalizing on early payment discounts.

Benefit #3: More Early Payment Discounts

For companies that aren’t quite sold on ECM, this is one of the benefits that stand out the most.

Many vendors offer discounts to customers who pay their invoices within a specific period of time (such as 10 or 15 days). But, companies that don’t have a streamlined process in place often struggle to meet these deadlines. Unfortunately, doing so is leaving money – and lots of it – on the table. At IntelliChief, one company that we worked with saved $5.4 million in early payment discounts in their first year using our ECM software.

Enterprise content management systems make it easy to capture these discounts. They can get invoices to the appropriate processors as soon as they’re received so that they’re not just sitting around waiting to be distributed. IntelliChief’s system can also speed up the process by:

  • Automatically performing the two- or three-way match
  • Sending a manager a notification (as well as a follow-up reminder, if necessary) if the invoice needs approval or GL coding
  • Scheduling prompt payment with your ERP

Learn more about how ECM benefits your bottom line through early payment discounts.

Benefit #4: Lower Employee Turnover

There’s a common misconception that automation will take the place of actual employees. ECM software, though, isn’t designed to replace humans – it’s designed to help them have an easier time with what they already do.

When highly trained employees (like accountants) aren’t burdened with repetitive, low-value tasks (like distributing invoices), they have more time to focus on work that actually reflects their education and experience. In turn, they tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, and less likely to leave for more rewarding opportunities.

Benefit #5: Higher Customer Satisfaction Rates

Your customers expect quick turnaround times, shipment notifications, accurate invoices, and fast responses when they contact you for support. If you’re not able to meet these expectations, you may be missing out on repeat business.

ECM benefits your customer service team by helping them better manage each of these important touchpoints. It helps you start processing orders as soon as they’re received, proactively communicate with customers when their items are on their way, and confirm that your invoices are accurate before you send them out. And, if a customer calls to ask about their order status, you’ll have all the information you need right at your fingertips. This gives your customers a much better experience.

Learn More About the Advantages of IntelliChief’s Enterprise Content Management System

More satisfied customers, more satisfied employees, and an improved bottom line – what’s not to love? At IntelliChief, we can help you discover the benefits of ECM for yourself. Our solutions engineers work hand-in-hand with all of our customers to configure IntelliChief to their particular business processes, giving IntelliChief the unique ability to be mapped to any workflow, no matter how complex or nuanced. It’s one of the major differentiators that sets IntelliChief apart from virtually every other solution on the market.

Contact us today, and we can introduce you to our time- and cost-saving enterprise content management system whenever it’s convenient for you.

 

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How Logistics Uses ECM

Accounting for logistics processes and procedures is complex, and it’s common to still see physical shipping documentation sent by express service to points of receipt, including your Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Customer Service departments – domestically and internationally. The manual handling of these printed documents is admittedly fraught with expense (time and money) and risks.

Having a clear picture of your distribution operations with all involved departments is crucial for your business. Though a challenge to this is managing logistics operations that are driven by paper, restricting the movement of every inbound and outbound shipment. Paper-based processes are slow and create bottlenecks in productivity, making important data contained in physical shipping documents—bills of lading, manifests, delivery receipts—difficult to process and track.

Capabilities have expanded to include automated documentation capture and company-specific processes workflow. This streamlines tasks related to shipping and receiving goods, enhancing the functionality of your existing platforms – ERP, SCM, WMS, Accounting systems and related business applications you use. Distribution is an industry benefiting from enterprise content management (ECM). Discover IntelliChief’s approach here.

How Logistics uses ECM: to automate capture of all formats of shipping documentation in both paper and electronic formats, assembling complete document collections from every source per transaction. Accuracy is validated with vendor and customer information stored in your ERP or SCM, and workflow automated with all departments involved in each transaction. Detailed visibility is provided throughout your distribution channel.

This document management capacity makes information easy to retrieve with automated organization for faster and more efficient content management. You’ll have instant access, with improved colleague and vendor-partner collaboration, and responsiveness to your customers, directly through your ECM-integrated desktop and mobile screens.

Collectively, ECM facilitates a solution to assure accuracy and security throughout distribution, as the foundation for building transactional transparency and trust, while streamlining business processes across your company’s fluid area of operations. Global trade logistics relies on a web of disparate systems across freight forwarders, custom brokers and port authorities, involving ocean, rail and trucking carriers. With ECM, you’re able to digitize the process to collaborate across companies and authorities, reduce the paperwork, streamline cross boarder movements, and limit fraud and errors.

Advantages encompassing how Logistics uses ECM:

  • Quicker outbound turnaround – leading to improved delivery efficiency, and stronger customer (and vendor) relationships
  • Documentation security – nothing is lost with ECM, with the people you need accessing your distribution documentation having it on-demand
  • Assured accuracy – with ECM syncing with your business system’s databases, all documentation is digitally captured with content data indexed and verified, alerting users of any discrepancies. Little or no system data keying is required; it’s simply straight-through processing into automated workflow
  • Lower document distribution costs – automation negates physical document shipping, and all associated costs
  • Faster notifications and approvals – with ECM’s automated workflow, everyone in your supply chain on the need-to-know does so quickly through automated notice, hastening processes and fulfillments
  • Document append abilities – as amendments, updates and approvals need to be added to original documents, they’re able to be, while maintaining the document’s integrity. Users can enter notes either in a pre-set field, or in a digital post-it note placement adjacent to the information being addresses. The document’s original data doesn’t change, though helpful information may be added and tracked by ECM and line of business system users throughout your logistics workflow.

These are particularly useful with Distribution’s transactional interaction among colleagues in Accounts Payable, Orders Processing and Customer Service departments; all areas of shipping document’s origination, destination and notification.

To see how, contact us.

Overcoming Business Challenges With Process Automation

Process automation can provide your organization with a number of benefits. The most notable?

  • More productivity
  • Faster workflows
  • Less expensive procedures

And the more you automate, the more you stand to benefit. Here’s a deeper look.

The Problem With Manual Business Processes

Most of the processes that keep your business running have manual traditions. While those processes may be sound (and may even be crucial to your company’s success), they may actually be holding you back.

So – how can something be essential, yet problematic?

Most have to go through several different people – or departments – before they’re finished. This involves lots of emails (or snail mail), phone tag, and uncertainty.

You need to have your people, your projects, and your transactions all on the same page.

Sharing Data to Eliminate Silos

According to Deloitte, many companies that don’t yet have automated workflows have a patchwork of disparate applications. These technologies don’t talk to each other, and there’s often a duplication of effort. In these cases, technology doesn’t ease the workload – it only makes it harder to collect data and achieve meaningful insights.

The result?

More time (and money) spent collecting information, unnecessarily high cycle times, inconsistent quality, and impaired agility.

Not exactly a recipe for success, but this is commonplace for businesses that have been unable to eliminate silos.

When Organizations Grow, So Do Their Processes

There’s also the issue of growth. As companies grow, employees take on larger workloads. Sometimes, companies do hire additional employees to help scale operations – but that’s always at a cost. Employees have to be recruited, trained, and brought up to speed on a company’s (often complex, and often poorly documented) internal processes. And if two companies merge together? It’s an ever larger tangle of procedures to consolidate.

One Way to Reduce Business Process Costs by as Much as 30 Percent

Deloitte also notes that automating workflows can reduce costs substantially. For a typical organization, that figure comes in at around 30 percent. That comes primarily from time and resources saved, although there’s also the matter of accuracy. Never having to go back and correct a wrongly completed process means more efficiency – and more benefits.

Repetitive Processes are Easier to Report

McKinsey brings up another benefit of automated processes. Workflows that are automated are less prone to variance and error, and easier to report. Regulatory compliance and auditing are less of a hassle when you have complete paper trails.

Let IntelliChief Help You Capture These Benefits With Process Automation

At IntelliChief, we can help you capture the benefits of automated processes with our ERP-integrated workflow automation software. It not only helps you speed up your processes and complete them more efficiently, but it also lets you streamline collaboration from end to end.

In addition to reduced costs, our customers can achieve:

  • A high level of flexibility for ever-adapting processes
  • More accurate data
  • Higher levels of employee engagement (as they are able to spend less time on repetitive work and more time on creative initiatives)
  • Faster project and transaction cycle times
  • Increased throughput
  • Increased customer satisfaction
  • Effortless regulatory compliance

To explore the solutions that make these benefits possible, contact IntelliChief. We’ll show you what process automation can do for your business – and just how easy it is to achieve.

Cost Savings in Logistics and Product Distribution

You move goods on a very large scale, but cost savings in logistics and product distribution can be hard to come by. Having a clear picture of your distribution operations of those goods is critical for business.

But, think about many of your logistics operations are driven by paper, restricting the movement of every inbound and outbound shipment. Paper-based processes are slow and create bottlenecks in productivity. They make important data contained in shipping documents, including bills of lading, manifests, and delivery receipts, difficult to process and track.

IntelliChief’s capture technology and electronic workflow processes can help you streamline tasks related to shipping and receiving goods. It can also enhance the functionality of your existing systems. Whether you use an ERP, a supply chain management system, warehouse management software, a transport management system, or a combination of several different programs, IntelliChief can easily connect all of your business applications.

How to Make Your Distribution Logistics More Efficient

The objective: improve visibility and reduce the time it takes to process information by capturing your shipping documents when they enter your business.

The strategy:

  • Automate the receipt of shipping documentation in paper or electronic formats
  • Standardize the document formatting, indexing, and data collection process
  • Collect critical information from images, barcodes, signatures, and text
  • Import this data into your system’s working fields
  • Link electronic copies to the appropriate core system and forward the documents to the appropriate workflow queue

Your newly standardized approach lets you manage all your processes from a single platform. Automated capture eliminates your need to print the documents and painstakingly key in the data – saving even more time in the process.

And because this all happens in real-time, you never miss a beat.

Track Every Single Shipment for Better Customer Service

The Sales-Fulfillment-Collections connection is the main engine of your company. Ensuring that orders are processed quickly and accurately is a primary objective. As your business grows, you need to be able to process more customer orders without adding personnel.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) lets your customer service, sales, and fulfillment staff:

  • Stay current on all client accounts
  • Receive real-time data verification
  • Send Order Acknowledgements via email or fax without user intervention
  • Accelerate order fulfillment with faster approvals
  • Gain order processing visibility throughout each transaction
  • Collect payments in a timely fashion, enhancing cash flow
  • Reduce costs associated with copying documents, updating logbooks, and chasing down lost orders
  • Run progression analytics and reporting on each order.

Learn More About Cost Savings in Logistics With IntelliChief

By seizing potential cost savings in logistics and product distribution, your organization can safeguard its bottom line from the unexpected. Our tailored solutions for freight document management were designed with the enterprise-class distributor in mind. Our ECM platform is uniquely equipped with the tools to help you not only master logistics and distribution today but also in the future. IntelliChief is one of the only ECM solutions designed specifically for the enterprise at scale. Our solutions grow with your business to help it avoid interruptions and benefit from ongoing cost-saving opportunities.

Want to learn more about the tangible cost savings of electronic freight document management? Contact IntelliChief today to speak with an expert about your project and requirements.

Early Payment Discounts for Increased Revenue

Early Payment Discounts

Early payment discounts can help your company save hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars every month.

Spend less on the products you need to buy, and increase your working capital. Take the money that you have sitting in a low-yielding corporate account, waiting to be sent to a supplier, and leverage it to generate a higher rate of return. It’s a valuable strategy for your business – but it can be easier said than done.

Dynamic Discounting as an Early Payment Incentive

It’s common for suppliers to offer regular discounts for early payment. Sometimes, companies that offer early payment discounts are trying to motivate customers to pay faster so they can reduce their DSO. Other times, they’re trying to address cash flow issues. Either way, your company can benefit from the incentive.

2/10 net 30 is a common example. This incentive would allow you to deduct 2 percent of the invoice’s total amount if you pay within 10 days. (If you pay within 30 days, you owe the entire balance. If you pay after that point, you may owe a late fee.)

If you’re offered 2/10 net 30 terms on a $1,000 invoice, you can pay just $980 if you’re able to issue that payment within a week and a half. If your company has the cash on hand (or a readily available line of credit), those terms are firmly in your favor. That 2% early payment discount for paying 20 days early? If you do that just 18 times in a fiscal year, you get an annual return of approximately 36%.

By taking advantage of dynamic discounts, your Accounts Payable department can directly impact your company’s profitability. The only problem? 10 days isn’t a lot of time.

The Problem with a Long Invoice Processing Cycle

When you get an invoice in the mail, it may be several days before someone finds it. And if you rely on manual invoice processing methods, it can take several more days to move it through your organization. Getting all of the approvals & validations that an invoice needs before it can be paid is painstakingly slow.

When you’re working with a short time frame, a single delay (like a processor being out of town) can prevent you from capturing those valuable discounts. And when you have hundreds of invoices to deal with every month? There’s a pretty high chance that at least a few of them fall through the cracks. That’s why many companies have a hard time processing their invoices quickly enough to qualify for early payment discounts.

A sad reality? Industry research shows that the average invoice processing cycle time is 12.4 days, from receipt till payment. It’s frustrating to miss the mark by just 2.4 days – but it’s also encouraging, as it means a few strategic changes can get you over the hump.

So how can you make your process more efficient?

Invoice automation lets you streamline your accounts payable workflow. You don’t have to manually collect your invoices, and you don’t have to manually confirm that the charges are correct. The technology handles all of the behind the scenes, automating the most time-consuming steps with ease. And if a key employee is out of the office? They can still process documents remotely, keeping your workflows…well…flowing.

At IntelliChief, we’ve helped our customers reduce their payment cycle times by as much as 80 percent. One customer was even able to capture $5.4 million savings in the 2016 fiscal year – just by using our automation software to process their incoming invoices.

Our AP automation software works directly with your enterprise content management system (ECM) to make sure every incoming invoice is correct. It even checks for “process-by” target dates – letting you finally start capitalizing on your early payment discounts, without extra work for your employees. It’s an easy way to start meeting your cash flow objectives – and we’re here whenever you’re ready to get started.

For more information or help speeding up your invoice processing cycle, contact IntelliChief today.

 

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Real-World, Real Benefits: How to Reduce Accounts Payable Processing Costs

Accounts Payable Expenses

Reducing Accounts Payable processing costs has officially become a movement — one driven figurately by the ability to better allocate staff resources and literally through automating transactional information and workflows. In an increasingly competitive business climate, improving the speed and accuracy of processing has become fundamental in achieving measurable growth. Accounts Payable automation is increasingly sought to securely capture all transaction information, which can then be utilized in any number of ways through system integrations that assure contractual-transactional integrity. New technology is shining a spotlight on the priorities of Finance and Accounting professionals, and the truth is evident: the benefits of reducing your company’s Accounts Payable processing costs are too substantial to ignore.

Moving from manual to automated environments increases transaction productivity and cash flow visibility. In a study of AP Management by The Institute of Financial Operations, cost savings and improved accuracy ranked as top justifications for investing in automated accounts payable solutions.

Their peer findings: 9 in 10 organizations still deal, at least in part, with paper invoices and transaction-related documentation, leading to higher costs, stifled efficiency, and a greater chance of erroneous information entering their system.

Highlights From the AP Processing Report

Failure to innovate can have a negative effect on the success of your business, especially when your business relies on outdated, paper-based processes to stay on top of money flowing in and out of your organization. By being the first to innovate, your business gains a competitive advantage over its rivals. The statistics below paint a clear picture of where our economy stands in terms of efficient AP processing:

  • 80% indicated their volume of invoices increased or remained roughly the same over the past year; 60 percent reporting the bulk of their increase was paper-based
  • 80% confirmed half or more of their invoices arrived paper-based; with a majority reporting paper exceeding 90 percent of their volume
  • 60% required between 5 and 25 full-time employees for invoice entry and matching
  • 70% had unimproved or increased invoice entry and payment error rates change in the last 18 months
  • 7 of 10 said that PO automation is an important component of an AP automation initiative
  • The most important drivers to automating the management of POs and invoices: a full 60% stated the desire of achieve better control over spend and ensuring purchases are with preferred suppliers, 45% to eliminate mismatches and exceptions that lead to blocked invoices
  • 65% noted the average time it takes to process an invoice changed over the past year has increased or remained unchanged
  • Just over half captured a significant amount of early payment discounts contractually available to them
  • Regarding imaging, 45% reported using front-end document capture capabilities. 20% included optical character recognition (OCR) to replace manual ERP keying. A mere 10% reported having data extraction and utilization capabilities. These companies could benefit significantly by enabling ERP-integrated invoice validation and routing direct entry into an automated workflow.

Making Your Organization More Competitive With Lower Accounts Payable Processing Costs

The above statistics are indicative of the current state of the industry, but how well do they describe your particular working environment? If the answer is “nearer than you would like,” your potential automation advantages include:

  • Eliminating manual invoice data entry to your ERP
  • Reducing your costs associated with processing and filing vendor invoices by an average of 75%
  • Increasing automation and streamlining your processes via workflow while reducing cycle time by an average of 80%
  • Increasing visibility into your AP processes through intuitive, decision-enhancing reports
  • Reducing the risk of late payment fees
  • Increasing the number of early payment discounts you receive
  • Maintaining your existing processes, but automating them to achieve superior results

To learn more about how your business can reduce accounts payable processing costs, read our AP automation guide. Or, learn more about  IntelliChief ECM for Accounts Payable for PO and Non-PO invoices by clicking here.

 

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How to Connect Business Systems Without Coding

There’s always some hesitance when it comes time to adopt new technology. This is especially true in niche business units that are traditionally “low-tech.” It’s no surprise, then, that Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Order Processing departments are oftentimes the most cautious about adding new software to the mix.

New technology needs to integrate seamlessly with your current technology infrastructure to provide measurable benefits, but trust is hard to build in the early stages of any relationship — and trusting a vendor is no different. Many businesses focus on what could go wrong when complex coding is needed to connect business systems. But what if we told you that there was a way to connect business systems without coding?

IntelliChief Integration Link Connects Business Systems Without Coding

IntelliChief makes it easy to manage your documents electronically. There’s no need for custom coding or technological savvy.

IntelliChief Integration Link lets you connect our Document Management and Workflow Automation technology to any application you already use. Within minutes, it creates a new application blueprint. From there, users can access documents and data that are stored in IntelliChief.

Users don’t have to click out of their familiar ERP.  This lets them access and index documents in IntelliChief from the ERP screens they are already used to. There’s no steep learning curve and you get to continue using the technologies you’ve already invested in. Best of all, you don’t have to work costly professional programming into your budget and training is streamlined.

How to Connect IntelliChief Without Coding

Through Integration Link Designer, any application can be image-enabled.

  • Open the Blueprint Designer, and open the application screen to integrate with IntelliChief
  • Select New Blueprint, and Integration Link will prompt to click on the screen in the application
  • Integration Link will recognize all the fields on the application’s screen and prompt them to link the corresponding fields in IntelliChief’s data processing profile (DPP)
  • Click to activate the blueprint, and the link’s established

This provides cross-platform usage of all information stored in each system.

Learn More About IntelliChief Integration Link

Integration Link offers premises, local, and remote/cloud-based options. You can also choose from production and custom systems. It’s a fast, user-friendly way to access & index documents throughout your entire organization. No matter what approach you choose, there’s no impact on your future ERP or business application system updates.

To learn more about connecting business systems without coding, contact IntelliChief today.

National Payroll Week

National Payroll Week is a week that every single company can be thankful for. After all, we all want to be paid for our effort and dedication — and who’s more dedicated than a company’s administrative professionals?

What Is National Payroll Week?

The American Payroll Association (APA) founded National Payroll Week in 1996 to celebrate the partnership between America’s employees, the payroll professionals who compensate them, and the important government programs and agencies funded by our payroll system

According to National Payroll Week, “Together through the payroll withholding system, payroll professionals collect, contribute, and report 70% of the U.S. Treasury’s annual revenue.”

That is a massive contribution, one worthy of acknowledgment and celebration. From September 6-10, payroll professionals around the country as well as the APA and its local chapters gather to host an array of community service projects centered around education on the importance of the payroll system. The goal is to answer important questions, including:

  • How are paychecks calculated?
  • How can employees get the most out of their pay?

Even if you aren’t a sponsor, you can still get in on the celebration. Here’s how IntelliChief plans to celebrate:

How IntelliChief Celebrates National Payroll Week

At IntelliChief, we’re celebrating National Payroll Week with a steady stream of “thank yous”…not to mention copious amounts of ice cream. We’re so thankful for everything they do – and we know you feel the same way!

But do your payroll employees know how appreciated they are? And more importantly – do they feel like they have the tools they need to properly do their jobs?

If your payroll department is frustrated by manual, time-consuming processes that never seem to end, it may be time to think about automation. How much more efficient could your employees be if they were able to automatically capture and organize their documents, collect approvals, and collaborate with HR and Accounting? More importantly, how much more satisfied would they be with their jobs if they had these capabilities?

IntelliChief makes it easy to get data from your paper documents to your Human Capital Management and Accounting software. This can make the payroll process significantly faster. It also reduces the time and resources that go into these ongoing procedures while providing records tracking and safeguarding.

If you’d like to learn more about consolidating your payroll workflows, contact IntelliChief today. In the meantime, keep celebrating National Payroll Week along with our friends at the American Payroll Association.  Thanks, Payroll Pros!

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