Specsavers is reaching the end of an 18-month project to
transform its finance systems to better support the expansion of
the business.
The optician chain said it faced a cut in its profit margins of
up to 1% if it continued to expand its business without
transforming the processes used in its Guernsey-based finance
department.
Two years ago, the firm set a target of increasing its total
number of outlets to 1,000 and boosting revenue to £1bn by 2009. To
achieve this, Specsavers realised it would have to automate the
manual processes used by its finance department.
Specsavers finance director Karen Dicks said, “We will reach our
targets by keeping the same level of staff, but we will target
staff at work more effectively.
“If we had not brought in the technology, we would have had to
hire extra people. We would have had to increase our headcount by
about two people per store.”
The company will spend more than £2m before the end of this year
on four projects to transform its finance function. A £500,000
contract was awarded to the supplier of the firm’s core finance
system, CedarOpenAccounts, at the beginning of the project some 18
months ago.
Earlier this year, Specsavers went live with its first two
transformation projects: an electronic expenses system and a
self-service payroll application from KCS. Both systems are
accessible through its IQ intranet.
The third project, to electronically capture all documentation,
is about 65% complete. The retailer is using software supplier
Version One’s DbArchive and DbCapture systems, which use optical
character recognition technology, to read incoming documents.
Dicks said the finance IT project had already replaced many
manual processes. “It is not necessarily about reducing the
complexity of the business processes; it is the complexity of
pushing huge amounts of paper around that is reduced,” he said.
Specsavers will go live with its fourth project, an e-invoicing
system from CedarOpenAccounts, before the end of the year.
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