Engineering

Customer Profile

A Northwest-based engineering hardware supplier with branches nationwide across the UK.

Challenges

The engineering hardware supplier receives more than 5,000 invoices each month as a mixture of both hard copies and by email. Each invoice is received into one of their 30 branches nationwide and then forwarded to the company’s head office for processing. To ensure the invoice is handled correctly, each one requires key information such as the Supplier Name, Branch, PO Number and Date.

Historically, when the branch received invoices from its suppliers, it would either temporarily file the hard copy or print and file the email attachment. At the end of the month, each branch would then scan all its invoices and forward to the Head Office. On receipt, the Head Office team would then print off all the invoices from each branch and sort them manually into Supplier sequence. The team would then proceed to highlight the Purchase Order Number and Date, passing all the invoices to the respective Accounts Clerk for processing.

This approach had proven to be time-consuming, laborious, and open to errors. As part of the engineering hardware supplier’s Quality Assurance process, it contacted Professional Managed Print and Document Solutions specialist Lynbrook as it had concerns over a number of invoices being mislaid each month, along with the time taken to identify the invoices ready for payment.

Solution

The engineering hardware supplier invited Lynbrook to study its existing process to identify areas where productivity improvements could be made. Across all branches and the Head Office it was estimated over 100 hours per month were spent preparing invoices. Lynbrook reviewed each sample invoice provided and in collaborative partnership with Konica Minolta Business Solutions (UK) Ltd designed a system that would fully automate the process and automatically deliver each document to the respective Accounts Clerk for processing.

The study confirmed the existing process was unnecessarily time consuming and as a starting point, Lynbrook encouraged the company to contact its suppliers to ensure Invoices were submitted to a centralised email address wherever possible. To ensure both hard copies and email invoices are both properly processed, Lynbrook designed a solution that fully automates the process from start to finish using 30 of Konica Minolta’s powerful bizhub multi-functional devices (which provide both scan and print functions) across the business, as well as Konica Minolta’s Document Navigator software, which reads the necessary information and intelligently processes the document content. Lynbrook applied the Document Navigator embedded licences to some key Konica Minolta MFD’s, plus installed the Document Navigator software on the customer’s hosted server. With just 5 days Professional Services, the full solution was rolled out and is continually supported and developed as the business progresses.

The solution includes:

Email Monitoring – whereby PDF attachments are copied from incoming emails ready for processing.

Supplier Identification – the supplier’s details are captured from the sender’s email address.

Data Extraction – within the body of each invoice the system extracts the key information required such as PO Number, Branch and Date.

Document Naming – the system names each Invoice with the PO Number.

Document Storage – each Invoice is then automatically stored in SharePoint by Month and Branch ready for processing.

For greater accuracy, a validation process was introduced so that any documents that did not contain all the required information went through to a verification process to ensure all invoices are correctly processed.

Benefits, Results, ROI, Future

By adopting the new system from Lynbrook and Konica Minolta, the engineering hardware supplier is now enjoying considerable benefits. These include the prevention of mislaid Invoices and a 99% reduction in processing manhours per month, which results in a saving of £1,500 per month in labour costs.