Case Studies

The Situation. FirstGroup America is the leading transportation operator in North America, moving nearly 5 million passengers daily by motor coach and school bus, operating in 49 states and 11 Canadian provinces/territories. They process hundreds of thousands of supplier invoices per year, but the manual process FirstGroup used was time consuming and labor intensive. Invoices were received at each local office and multiple manual steps, inter office mailing and often duplicate data entry was required before the invoice was approved and ready to voucher in FirstGroup’s JD Edwards accounting system. Further, each month all paper invoices were shipped to an outsource image provider, scanned and images uploaded to an image server for viewing.

The Situation. Calor Gas Ltd. is the UK's leading supplier of liquefied petroleum gas. Close to 4 million homes and businesses across the UK rely on Calor Gas for a variety of applications. The company’s headquarters and centralized corporate services center, responsible for all accounting and information system activities, are in Warwick, and supports over 60 sales, service and office sites. The company had a very complex Purchase-to-Pay 3-way matching process and experienced serious operational bottlenecks as the number of vendor invoices increased. The Calor Gas process improvement objective was to eliminate these bottlenecks and improve customer service without adding personnel.

The Situation. BE&K, Inc., one of the 50 largest engineering and construction firms in the United States, services a wide variety of industries, including pulp and paper, process chemical and manufacturing. The company, headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., has eight operating divisions that are involved in hundreds of jobs around the United States and the globe at any one time.

The Situation. Turner Industries, an industrial contractor based in Baton Rouge, La., offers a wide range of services in the construction industry. From construction and equipment rental to maintenance, scaffolding and tank cleaning, Turner provides a number of diverse services through a structure of 17 industrial-focused companies with 14 regional offices.

The Situation. The Stellar Group is a full-service design/build facility development company based in Jacksonville, Fla., that provides architecture, engineering, construction and refrigeration services to industrial, commercial and institutional markets. The company designs and constructs facilities for food processing, food storage, auto dealers, education, healthcare, hospitality, industrial and Class-A office space.