AP automation bounds into view at SEMA

June 5, 2009:Australia's SEMA Group has gone live with a full accounts payable automation solution along with the first installation of the Filebound Content Management suite in Australia.

SEMA’s new offering of a hosted accounts payable platform will offer organisations across Australia an opportunity to improve back office productivity and integration and ultimately provide an improved customer experience.

The accounts payable platform is regarded as the next big opportunity to improve business performance through collaboration. It is estimated that over 80 percent of today’s Accounts Payable departments are still entrenched in paper. According to industry analysts, manual processing can cost up to four times per invoice compared to Accounts payable electronic invoice presentment and processing (AP-EIPP) .

SEMA’s accounts payable hosting solution, augments the image bureau and document archival and retrieval services that SEMA already provides as back office support to Australian organisations.

SEMA Group is a leading supplier of information technology and marketing services in Australia, providing communications management solutions to create Informational Advantage for its clients through its consulting, software and execution expertise. SEMA’s focus is helping their clients manage customer interactions and support – front and back office.

Installed prior to Christmas 2008, the The FileBound Solution features tight integration into an OCR front end scanning solution from ReadSoft.

SEMA Director of Business Transformation Services, Lee Bourke. said "In the past year or two there has been a real buzz developing around accounts payable automation, but to offer this service to our clients we needed a document workflow solution that we could provide to those who didn't have one. We also needed to be able to work with a large array of ERP and finance systems. The final proof was being able to do it for ourselves, demonstrating to our clients the extent to which we believe in this technology and we have seen the effects almost immediately.”

“SEMA is on track to reduce its direct accounts payable labour by 50% to redeploy into more value add activities, with other knock-on benefits to flow further down the process,” said CFO Keith Hunter.

Every month, SEMA receives over 1100 invoices, comprising almost 3000 pieces of paper for its own Finance (payables) Department across the country.

When paper was still the medium, four staff were needed to handle SEMA invoices to route them to their respective owners for approval. There was also the need to conduct ERP system searches to locate established purchase orders where they had not been provided on the supplier invoice for payment.

The front end for scanning paper invoices that arrive each day at SEMA's offices is handled by the latest Kodak i660 scanners, prized for their flexibility in being able to accommodate varying document sizes of invoice formats. SEMA Nationally operates an imaging bureau with a fleet of high speed Kodak i660 and i620 scanners.

A range of Kodak scanner guide attachments with specifically partnered image capture software (Kodak Capture Pro) undertakes realtime image document rotation based on OCR directional print assessment of the form being processed.

"These specific innovations along with a very large range of image management tools and enhancements within the Kodak Capture Pro certainly allow for greater imaging productivity. This is just some of the technological smarts that Kodak supplier to support their equipment which targets our objectives to reduce physical effort where possible within the imaging process," said Bourke.

Invoice images are captured and processed by ReadSoft Interpret Engines and the ReadSoft INVOICES product is utilised on Invoice Images with Invoice (image) Recognition Libraries and OCR semi- structured document assessment for printed text capture.

SEMA found that the main challenge in automating the processing of invoices did not appear at the scanning stage, as ReadSoft's products learnt and managed managed these semi-structured documents with ease.

"The more challenging elements were/are around the setup and smart utilisation of integrated lookup tables from our financial application, AXAPTA, to validate invoice data where possible prior to the data/image transfer to FileBound for the Accounts Payable team," said Bourke.

"SEMA understand that workflows can be more effective when validation activities can be applied at the first point of assessment/verification as this reduces the double handling efforts downstream."

"We are already good partners of Readsoft, and FileBound have a great model for us, as their pricing is based on usage."

FileBound Australia proposed a Data Centre Licensing solution which is based upon usage not per seat user licensing.

"Because of the usage model FileBound offers, SEMA did not have to worry about who can use it because it is unlimited users. They just need to consider how many documents they will be holding in their repository," said Greg Lennon - CEO of FileBound Australia.

"The FileBound Solution is not just an Accounts Payable Solution. It is a full Content Management suite of products which will allow SEMA Group if they choose to use the system for many other areas of their business at a later date such as HR, accounts receivables, general office documents, tracking of physical files stored off site and any other areas where managing paper based content is a problem.

"The FileBound Solution also offers unlimited workflows for business process improvements. Allowing them to automatically workflow their scanned invoices along a defined workflow path or send the invoices ad-hoc if needed. It also allows for SEMA to put rules in place invoices over a predefined amount to be automatically routed to a supervisor or CFO if over a certain amount for extra level approvals," said Lennon.

There is a large installed base of FileBound accounts payable solutions in the US working in combination with ReadSoft. Built on Microsoft .Net Technology, it has a Microsoft look and feel of a Microsoft product therefore reducing a lot of the change management issues some companies face when changing from paper based document usage to electronic.

The FileBound Solution has a completely open object model with a full set of APIs supplied for integrate into most legacy applications, as well as an unlimited Electronic Forms Package.

Phase 2 of the accounts payable automaton project is about to get underway, which will see the integration of the FileBound application with SEMA's financials application, AXAPTA."The first phase of integration will have the FileBound application call the respective AXAPTA modules locally within the FileBound session, and have the Payable Clerk validate Invoice meta data captured from the Invoice against the respective AXAPTA general ledger coding and purchase order references," said Bourke.

"This initial phase will provide the basis for foundation learning's for the straight through processing integration of invoice data directly into AXAPTA (except for Invoices carrying exceptions). First phase integrations include the auto complete of invoice fields whereby AXAPTA source tables hold respective relational data that the invoice does not carry, FileBound is supplied this data as a part of the initial integration elements."

Having accomplished the milestone of automating its own internal accounts payable process, SEMA is keen to extend its expertise in understanding these workflows from end to end."SEMA has a strong pedigree in Business Process Outsourcing including large scale, high complexity imaging applications," said Bourke."SEMA can assist with business Process Re-engineering, Workflow system provision, Systems Integration, Capture and Archival."

"We have a very experienced team and the necessary skills to allow our customers to achieve the desired accounts payable automation results as exercised at SEMA."

David Peraino, an order-to-pay product executive with J.P. Morgan, recently said, "We're now seeing many organisations kick that habit as the business case for accounts payable (A/P) automation becomes more broadly understood. In fact, A/P automation represents the next great opportunity to leverage collaboration in a way that transforms business performance."

Regulatory pressures are making CFOs More interested in the technology in 2009, according to Robin Renfrey, Sales Director - Documents, for Readsoft Australia.

"Once a document is scanned you can assess your liability. We have seen a big jump in interest in scanning and automating invoice processing in the last 12 months in Australia."

New Invoices that arrive each day are scanned then the image optimised within the ReadSoft Library to ensure immediate recognition and acceptance the next time the supplier sends an invoice to SEMA for payment. The Optimisation process allows for continual learning of various invoice types and respective capture points on the document, such as where to find details such as dates, supplier name, PO Number, total invoice cost, and GST Amount. A SEMA Verification Supervisor approves new Invoice documents as they are isolated in daily processing batches. The acceptance process will qualify the data capture anchor points that make this document unique (text locations + logo's + PO Box Details of the Supplier), then ReadSoft acknowledges these aspects of the document to create the unique document profile.

"The first pass accuracy of the ReadSoft OCR interpret engines contribute to the overall strength of their product suite," said Bourke, "Our SEMA technology team perform constant assessment of our employed OCR confidence levels by document types to ensure maximum integrity and efficiencies are always achieved."