The company realizes instant ROI with AP automation and integrates MFPs for edge scanning
The Client
One of Canada’s largest residential property management businesses with hundreds of condominium and apartment buildings under management, providing end-to-end property management services for public and private sector clients.
Business Challenge – Highlights
The initial business challenge was supporting print devices at both the corporate office and client site level. Devices were not standardized, multiple service and lease agreements from various vendors had staggered start/end dates, and charging back their clients for printing and copying was extremely time-consuming.
Further, the business was manually entering invoice details into their home-grown legacy financial system. On a monthly basis, 7,000 invoices were manually processed from over 250 vendors. The process was time-consuming, error-prone, and required a team of 9 staff members.
The Solution & Execution
During Phase 1 of this client engagement, the SmartPrint MPS Consultant created a detailed picture of the current print infrastructure. With the client’s input, the MPS Consultant built out a roadmap to optimize the print environment by standardizing devices, moving to a single brand of print devices, and a simple support model for all devices across the entire organization. At the same time, devices at the corporate level were enabled with a print management solution that allowed print, copy, and scan jobs to be billed back to specific client codes. With SmartPrint’s 360 print-as-a-service program, all costs for the print hardware and support were consolidated into one monthly invoice and allowed the client to have the flexibility to add or remove devices as their client portfolio evolved over time.
During Phase 2, SmartPrint’s Intelligent Workflow team worked closely with the client’s CAO and Finance team to implement an AI (artificial intelligence) enabled document classification and extraction solution. The tool was deployed to automate the extraction of key invoice details from hard copies and digital files and pass those invoice details to their home-grown financial system for processing. The cloud-based application is 98% accurate and automatically flags data that it is not 100% confident it extracted properly. Flagged data is sent to a human verifier that either approves or corrects the data. The AI component of the solution will learn from the human verifier’s correction and will extract the data properly the next time it sees that invoice.
With the end to end solution support that SmartPrint MPS services combined with SmartPrint’s Intelligent Workflow expertise, the company is able to rely on one organization to support a bulletproof system for automated data ingestion with all invoice digital inputs automated, including scanning from the standardized office print equipment, email and web form workflows that are automated. The end-to-end integrated support has enabled IT programmers and help desk teams to gain valuable time back by being able to rely on the experts to support the integrations and equipment.
Outcome & Results
- A standardized print environment with a single support model for all devices across the organization
- Decreased office printing costs, and more visibility into those costs to help identify further cost-saving opportunities
- A simple chargeback solution for allocating print, copy, and scan costs back to clients
- One monthly invoice for all print hardware, software, and support with the flexibility to add/remove assets to reflect the needs of the business
- True automation of invoice data extraction and moving that data to the financial system for processing
- 67% efficiency gain – 6 of the 9 AP clerks were reallocated to other parts of the business
- An instant ROI and significant OPEX savings
- No data entry errors
- A future-proof solution that will scale with the business’ growth and can integrate with any future financial system or ERP system
- A bulletproof system for automated data ingestion with all invoice digital inputs automated, including scanning, email and web forms. This end to end coverage is enabled by coupling SmartPrint MPS services with SmartPrint Intelligent Workflow expertise
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