The Client
An industrial manufacturing business that distributes their finished goods globally, with 3 plants and 2600 employees located in 3 Canadian provinces.
Business Challenge – Highlights
In 2019, demand for this manufacturer’s products was increasing dramatically. The increased product sales caused the accounting team to struggle with a workload that was steadily growing. Outdated accounting processes, error-prone manual data entry, and maintaining approvals and paper trails were becoming a significant challenge for the department. The Director of the accounting team needed help to solve these problems.
The Solution & Execution
With support from SmartPrint’s Intelligent Workflow team, the struggling accounting department implemented a solution to standardize and improve their accounting processes by automating them to ease the burden of manual data entry and paper chasing. The department completed an initiative to go paperless across each accounting process in a 6-week period. The project enabled the accounting team to focus on more interesting work that adds value to the business rather than dealing with frustrating distractions of inefficient and time-consuming manual tasks.
Outcome & Results
- Automation that digitally transformed the department and decreased the time required for invoice tracking and payment approvals, data entry, and extraction, saving 16 hours per week for each employee on the accounts payable team
- Accounts payable had a 50% reduction in invoice processing time and eliminated approval bottlenecks, data entry errors, double payment issues, and lost invoices
- Through implementing an integrated machine learning software solution, 95% of their invoices are automatically ingested into the workflow engine and the current financial system with no data entry, reducing human error dramatically
- Digital copies of purchase orders, invoices and cheques are securely stored and easily retrievable for the accounting and expanded team
- Costs to physically print, copy and store paper documents in filing cabinets and off-site storage have been eliminated
- Significant ROI with less than a 3 month payback period
The successful project opened the minds of other department leaders to investigate digital transformation initiatives to increase productivity and simplify the business. The software tools used to transform the accounting department can also be used across the whole business to solve workflow problems.
Find out more about how SmartPrint’s Intelligent Workflow solutions can help you digitally transform your accounting department and automate your AP processes by completing the form below.