Our customer, local to our Crawley office first contacted us to look at alleviating the in-house and mundane task of scanning purchase ledger records on a daily basis and re-naming the image files.
Purchase invoices were being received daily, averaging 1,150 per month. After details had been input into the organisations A/P software the hard copy image files were being scanned using a multi-function device and each individual image file renamed to the unique docket number generated by the A/P software. This task was allocated to the front desk receptionist with a backlog of entries frequently building due to other administration roles associated to the post.
After analysis we concluded the two bottlenecks being the unreliability of the multi-function scanning device together with the laborious task associated with re-naming the image files.
Two solutions were presented:
- The first being to re-engineer the in-house operation replacing the scanner and adding a semi-automated mechanism for naming the image files.
- The second being to outsource all of the scanning to our specialist bureau facility.
After consideration the second option became the preferred choice.
We now collect the invoices weekly and automatically rename the image files at the point of scanning using barcode technology. A database application is then used to identify any duplicate and or mis-indexed records where a manual override can be implemented to re-name any erroneous files correctly. WeTransfer is used to securely transfer the image files back to the customer on the day of receipt.
The new process has met all goals/targets and has proved to be a huge hit with the receptionist; we now collect 3 further document types on a regular basis to further enhance the clients operation.
