Challenge
The Denihan Hospitality Group oversees one of the largest privately held and independently operated hotel portfolios on the Eastern Seaboard,
which includes two distinctly recognizable brands, Affinia Hotels and The Benjamin.
The company’s financial department was partially automated as they were utilizing an electronic based purchasing process. However, their Accounts Payable process was paper based and reliant upon inefficient and
unproductive manual procedures. Most importantly, information was inaccessible to employees throughout the organization who needed it on an
ongoing basis.
Management wanted to improve access to financial information throughout the organization and increase the A/P staff’s productivity.
The A/P staff was spending unproductive time manually managing, filing and retrieving paper documents. Documents were sometimes misplaced
and couldn’t be located when needed, or worse, they were lost for ever.
These paper related problems were compounded during the month-end process when the A/P staff was inundated with calls from various managers throughout the organization. During these times, productivity was curtailed as the A/P staff had to interrupt their core business functions to search for requested documents that then had to be faxed throughout the organization. Documents could not always be found quickly preventing departmental managers from performing their month-end responsibilities in a timely manner.
Solution
Digiscribe provided a web-based, paperless, document management system - ImageSilo® - that was easy to implement and cost effective. Business critical A/P documents could be quickly and easily stored, accessed, distributed and shared by A/P staff and management throughout the organization - directly from their computers.
On a weekly basis, thousands of invoices, checks and A/P files were sent to Digiscribe for prepping, scanning and indexing at their production facility. Within three days, the image and data files were uploaded to ImageSilo for immediate access by Denihan’s employees.
In order to ensure accurate and dependable retrieval, the documents were manually indexed by check number and reference number and then automatically enhanced with 14 index fields matched from Denihan’s accounting system; such as vendor name, invoice number, purchase order number, dollar amount. Document retrieval was robust and reliable as there were a multitude of fields that could be searched on. The automation of index values contained costs, eliminated unnecessary key strokes and minimized the possibility of keying errors.
Digiscribe integrated the system with Microsoft Dynamics SL, Denihan’s ERP platform for real-time access to information. A/P staff could instantly look-up supporting documentation for any transaction by using a simple keystroke directly from within the system. Adoption rates throughout the organization were high as the interface was easy to learn and user-friendly.
Benefits of this Digiscribe solution
- Immediate access to business critical A/P files from any computer, 24x7, throughout the organization.
- Greater employee efficiency.
- Streamlined business processes among departments.
- Faster and more responsive service to interdepartmental managers.
- No capital investment required.
- No IT support or infrastructure required.
- Audit trails, security logs and utilization reports ensured data security and regulatory compliance.
- No more lost or misplaced documents.
- More efficient use of office space and less clutter.
- Provided an environmentally-friendly alternative to document printing and copying.
- Quick ROI.
Post Script
The VP of Finance was so happy with the results of Digiscribe’s solution that Denihan is planning to incorporate workflow into the A/P business process. Digiscribe would act as Denihan’s PO Box, scan and index the invoices daily and securely deliver them to Denihan’s accounting department in an electronic format for processing and payment. The workflow component will be seamlessly integrated with ImageSilo.