FirstGroup America Eliminates Paper Bottlenecks, Costs By Digitizing Supplier Invoices & Automating Processing With Integration

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.

“We felt that bringing this process in-house and adding workflow to automate the authorization process would provide greater efficiency and allow us to gain synergies within our Accounts Payable process,” Says Brenda Chapman, VP for Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable at FirstGroup. “We were also very excited about the opportunity to create an automated process that would allow us to provide better service to both our internal and external customers by improving turnaround time, eliminating manual work and providing easy access to document images. Process automation was key if we were going to reduce the strain on our staff and cut costs.”

The Solution. The new solution was installed in June 2009 and is integrated seamlessly with the JD Edwards ERP system using IIS’s DocuSphere® products. Invoices are sent from the suppliers to the Corporate AP department for scanning. The paper invoices go no farther, as AnyDoc’s OCR for AnyDoc captures the image and printed information on the invoice using OCR (optical character recognition), converting it to electronic data that can be compared with the PO data already stored in the JD Edwards system. If these data match the PO already stored in the system, then DocuSphere Workflow and AutoVoucher modules automatically structure and submit the transaction to the JD Edwards system for payment. The invoice image is stored in the DocuSphere Content Manager electronic repository, and can be directly accessed for viewing or retrieval by a button click from within the JD Edwards system.

If the extracted invoice data don’t match the PO, then the invoice image is automatically routed by DocuSphere Workflow to an AP activity “inbox” to verify that the data captured off the invoice is correct and make any necessary edits. Then, DocuSphere automatically submits the invoice for JD Edwards processing and payment.

Invoices for items purchased without a PO follow a slightly different process. They are also scanned and data is captured, and electronically and automatically routed by DocuSphere Workflow to the appropriate regional approver and then to the correct corporate contact for authorization to pay. As with the PO based invoices, the non-PO invoices and data are automatically structured and submitted to the JD Edwards AP system for payment. DocuSphere also allows FirstGroup to set its own time limits and escalation rules on these activities to ensure an invoice doesn’t sit in an employee’s inbox too long and create payment delays.

Results. “Our new automated document capture and workflow solution has eliminated much of the manual data entry that used to occur at the local office level,” says Chapman. “Furthermore, the system has eliminated the shipping charges we used to incur by mailing paper invoices twice. The initial deployment of this solution has been so successful that we also expanded the solution to help automate our capital expenditure requests and are in the process of implementing the solution to automate our check and supplier request processes as well.”