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 Accounts Payable staff processes approximately 120,000 vendor invoices per year. These were sent to the headquarters A/P department from 65 Calor Gas sites. However, A/P was frequently unable to voucher invoices due to problems of incomplete or inaccurate order and receipts data. Often inputs from multiple departments and locations were required before an invoice could be properly vouchered. The process was manually intensive and could take weeks.
The Solution. Calor selected Formscan, Image Integration Systems’ UK partner, to design, develop and implement the DocuSphere® automated workflow and imaging solution to improve purchase-to-pay processing.
A critical solution component is DocuSphere JDE Integration, certified by JD Edwards (Oracle) for interaction with Calor’s JD Edwards ERP system. The business process “engine” is DocuSphere Workflow, a standards-based, thin client, web-enabled system that automates enterprise-wide business processes across all application systems with flexible, graphical management tools that easily create, maintain and secure workflow schema. Among other functions, DocuSphere Workflow provides remote authorization and the Auto Voucher module automates voucher creation for PO and non-PO invoices.
Other components are DocuSphere Content Manager, a complete thin client, web-enabled document imaging and archiving system for viewing, managing and distributing electronic documents across internal networks and the web. And DocuSphere Electronic Report Management to automatically capture and index ERP generated documents such as PO’s. AnyDoc’s advanced OCR products for “intelligent” document capture and data extraction is integrated with the solution to further automate scanning and reduce manual data entry.
Results. The A/P Department has doubled capacity to process invoices and at the same time reduced staff size. The DocuSphere solution has made invoice processing faster, cheaper and better for Calor Gas: increased efficiency, reduced transactional costs, complete process visibility and data integrity, and improved customer service.
Invoices arrive at the Calor Gas central A/P department, are scanned, captured with AnyDoc, enter the DocuSphere Workflow and are immediately routed to the responsible parties. Automatic, daily reminder emails prompt attention to outstanding activities in the workflow. Vouchers are automatically created and submitted to JD Edwards. Through DocuSphere Content Manager, these and other documents are immediately accessible at all sites to the 1,500 Calor Gas employees in Sales, Operations, IT, HR and Finance.
The DocuSphere solution has provided Calor Gas with impressive gains in productivity and customer service.
About Formscan. Since 1976, Formscan has delivered document solutions to businesses and government organizations to improve processes, productivity and service levels, and lower costs. A specialist in the document industry, Formscan has outstanding expertise in systems integration, problem solving and technical innovation. For more information, visit www.formscan.com.
About Image Integration Systems. Image Integration Systems (IIS) was formed in 1993 to develop, implement and support business process improvement solutions in high-volume transaction environments. IIS professionals have extensive experience with ERP business processes in accounts payable, sales order processing, billing and shipping. IIS DocuSphere products for workflow, document management and ERP integration are certified for the leading ERP software providers, including Oracle and SAP. For more information, visit www.DocuSphere.com.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Calor Case Study (pdf) | 105.49 KB |