Soft drinks group Nichols, maker of drinks including
Vimto and Sunkist, is saving £100,000 a year after rolling out
electronicdocument managementand imaging
software.
The software has been central to consolidating the
financial processes of the group's five companies, the company
said.
Allan Doyle, IT director at Nichols, said, "We realised that
consolidating so many financial departments would be possible only
with the right paperless technology in place that would provide a
reliable and cost-effective means of getting invoices approved
quickly and easily."
"We were able to deploy the software and train staff to use the
system within a week, with the bulk of the cost savings coming from
being able to reduce the number of purchase ledger clerks from six
to one and being able to redeploy up to 70% of the accounts staff's
time," Doyle said.
The software, which has been in place for three years, has
allowed the company to cut the group's paper consumption by at
least 80% by e-mailing sales invoices to customers and scanning all
incoming documents. "As a result, we saw a return on our investment
within three months of deployment," Doyle said.
The system, supplied by Version One, enables Nichols to archive
electronic images of incoming and outgoing documents, which are
then accessible to all authorised staff across the
organisation.
Doyle said this has reduced the time taken to search for
documents such as purchase invoices from as long as thirty minutes
to just a few seconds.
Once the archive is backed up each day, all original documents
are shredded, eliminating the need for physical storage space.
The authorisation module uses Nichols' wide area network to send
electronic purchase orders around the organisation for approval.
Once approved or rejected, the invoice is returned to the shared
services centre for further action.
Doyle said holding documents in an electronic archive and
delivering them electronically has also eliminated the risk of lost
and wrongly filed paper documents, which was a common problem
before the implementation of the system.
Nichols chose supplier Version One because its storage,
authorisation, delivery and form design software met the business
needs and was pre-integrated with the group's existing Sage ERP and
accounting systems.