Invoice processing that meets the demands of growth
Wildman Business Group, which was founded in 1952 by Rex Wildman as a corporate laundry service, prides itself on providing high-quality, personalized service. Its commitment to customers and employees has helped lead to 200 percent growth in the last four years.
Wildman’s divisions include Uniform & Linen, Facility Services, Corporate Apparel and IDNA Brands—a supplier of major-league branded promotional items. They submit over 40,000 invoices a year from major retailers, which entails tedious, error-prone manual entry into Sage 100 ERP.
Claudia Keirn, assistant controller of Wildman Business Group, says, “By 2016, we finally reached a tipping point. We printed each invoice received as a PDF via email, checked its PO, manually entered its data into Sage 100, verified the data, then routed and filed the physical document.”
Wildman’s complex AP approval processes, which relied on paper, involved workflows that spanned six divisions, causing inefficiency and delay. The company recognized that its rapidly expanding business needed a solution fast.
“Paper was piling up on desks and approval times were impacted. Filing and storing all those invoices was also burdensome and so was having to retrieve an invoice if there was a query,” Keirn explains. “We anticipated that invoice growth would track business growth, so AP automation became a priority.”
Keirn and her team identified the need to use intelligent invoice data capture software to capture and automatically enter data from invoices received as PDFs into Sage 100 with the images simultaneously uploaded into SharePoint. Wildman received a demonstration from User Friendly Consulting, Inc. that showed how well the intelligent capture solution also worked with SharePoint Online and FileNet P8.
Within five working days Wildman had a new solution in place. All invoice data is automatically captured by ABBYY (abbyy.com) FlexiCapture from the invoice images, uploaded into its Sage 100 ERP system, and the images themselves are sent straight into SharePoint. The system validates the invoice data according to Wildman’s custom rules, then the invoices are automatically routed to the correct people for approval.
Keirn says, “We have increased productivity by 40 percent and are confident that our automated invoice processing system will be able to easily handle continued invoice volume growth.”
Wildman plans to expand the use of OCR software to automate other areas of accounts payable such as to scan check remittances, apply payments and streamline vendor statements.