Norikkon Equips Duke with Accounts Payable Power
APayCenter Streamlines Accounts Payable Process Delivering Measurable Results
About Duke
- Reducing accounts payable staffing expenses
- Eliminating paper invoice copy and distribution
- Reducing time-consuming tasks
- Increasing overall processing time
Objective 1: Document Storage, Distribution and Capture
Duke receives nearly 40% of its invoices on paper and 60% electronically. Before using APayCenter, Duke users distributed paper invoices manually, creating multiple copies. Off-site paper storage added more issues, along with a recurring challenge of how best to process and store different invoice formats such as paper, fax, email, and electronic.
Objective 2: Invoice Process Automation
Norikkon's APayCenter eliminated the backlog. The data extracted by OCR capture technology is sent to Duke's SAP server and content repository, then Norikkon's APayCenter pulls the data. The APayCenter dashboard provides Duke with a real-time, at-a-glance view of liabilities and the status of each invoice. Through this central location, Duke users can process SAP work items directly or use the SAP Workplace. Using a variety of search criteria, users can pinpoint specific invoices, current or historical, and provide direct links to invoice images and supporting documentation.
Objective 3: Exception and Approval Automation
Duke accounts payable has up to 80 different issues documented as invoice exceptions. These exceptions include both pre-posting problems that prevent invoice posting, as well as, post-posting invoice payment blocks, including:
- Missing/Invalid PO
- Missing approval
- Price/Quantity variance
- Invoice duplicates
- Item not on PO
- Vendor maintenance
- Missing tax code
- Missing documentation
- Value exceeds limit payment block
- Quantity difference payment block
- Price difference payment block
Objective 4: Reporting and Analytics
Before using APayCenter, Duke users were limited in their ability to generate specific reports with real-time data.
Norikkon's APayCenter provides Duke with substantial new reporting capabilities that enable users to quickly generate specific productivity, liability, and invoice status reports, which departments and financial analysts can use to make timely and accurate business decisions. Also, since APayCenter leverages SAP workflow and ABAP, IT personnel can configure APayCenter to provide special reports that are outside APayCenter's standard report structure and change workflow as needed.
Objective 5: Audit and Compliance
Before using APayCenter, Duke's ability to retrieve invoice documents was not only labor-intensive and tedious, but support information was often missing, leaving an incomplete audit trail.
What APayCenter delivered
- APayCenter's ability to fully integrate with SAP and their chosen OCR solution, and
- APayCenter's extensive flexibility to meet their specific business requirements. The results below confirmed their choice and made a measurable difference in the way Duke accounts payable does business.
APayCenter delivered real results for real challenges
- Elimination of paper copy and distribution costs.
- Reduction of invoice backlog by 10-15 days.
- Making all invoices visible to internal clients within 24 hours of receipt.
- Enabling managers to gain real-time access to liabilities, productivity, and invoice status.
- Eliminating internal auditor inquiries by providing direct access to critical data, inside and outside of SAP.
- Reducing processing time with automatic routing to resolve exceptions and invoice approvals, internally and externally using SAP workflow and SAP-integrated Norikkon's APayMail.
- Reducing time fulfilling external auditors' requests by using batch functionality to download data into PDF files from SAP and email to auditors.
- Enabling Duke's IT personnel to make changes to workflow as needed.
- Allowing for the reduction of 25% of Duke AP staff, enabling the reallocation of those resources to support Duke's mission of education, research, and patient care.