Service and Distribution Company Automates Their Invoice Process with SharePoint and Ephesoft

Summary

DH Pace is a national company that has been providing door, dock, and door-related products and services to home and business owners since 1926. With more than 2,600 employees in 50 locations and a fleet of more than 1,400 vehicles, DH Pace’s mission is to improve the safety, security, and convenience of buildings in the communities they serve by installing, maintaining, and servicing door, docking, and security systems nationwide.

Challenge

DH Pace looked to Zia Consulting and Ephesoft to help streamline their accounts payable process and better utilize their existing SharePoint platform.

Each month, DH Pace processed thousands of invoices from hundreds of vendors, each with varying formats. This required laborious data entry by DH Pace employees. They manually classified and indexed documents, which was prone to human error. They sought a way to streamline their processes, improve quality, improve customer satisfaction, and increase efficiency.

In addition to implementing an invoice automation system, Zia transformed two additional departments within AP. The Baan AP process was manual, consisting of vendor invoices arriving in specific division email inboxes. Then, they moved invoices to the division’s New folder on a network share drive. The process involved a series of decision points and interaction with Baan to process invoices.

The cERP AP process used email, MS Dynamics NAV, and SharePoint. It required administrator attention to receive invoices, statements, and credit memos in email.

Strategy

As a client of Zia Consulting and a platinum-level Ephesoft partner, DH Pace sought advice on automation. After a discovery meeting, Zia Consulting recommended that DH Pace implement the Ephesoft Smart Capture^® platform to automate their invoice processing. Ephesoft’s smart-document capture system is powered by supervised machine-learning technology that ingests, classifies, extracts, validates, and exports metadata. DH Pace integrated Ephesoft with their existing Microsoft SharePoint platform for straight-through processing, passing data directly into their content management system. It took Zia Consulting 11 weeks to implement the Baan and cERP projects.

“SharePoint has helped us speed up internal workflow processes in a variety of ways—including document management, contract approval, and building/system maintenance. With SharePoint as our content management system, we can easily assign individual tasks to users, design approval levels around document types, and easily report on the details of each. SharePoint has helped make our organization more efficient,” DH Pace Business Analyst Robbie Carlson said.

Results

Since implementing Ephesoft in 2012, DH Pace has freed up 635 labor hours per month (4 FTE/month), as a conservative estimate.

“We have been able to reallocate this time to address other pressing accounts payable tasks, including the ability to process more invoices and to move additional invoice volumes and divisions to our team,” DH Pace Director of Accounts Payable John Meiers said. “The new Ephesoft process has had a dramatic effect on our organization and is the most important process improvement change we have made in our accounts payable processing.”

The total solution reduced errors and expedited processing time with an additional 1,000 invoices processed per month.

“Ephesoft and Zia provided a solution that was all-inclusive at a single price and gave us the flexibility we needed without worrying about the extra costs,” Assistant Director of Process Improvement Kevin Dunn said.