Scan Conversion Services has announced the successful deployment of its Complete Automated Accounts Payable System (CAAPS) for Discovery Holiday Parks (DHP), the largest owner-operator of accommodation parks in Australia.

DHP has more than 30 holiday parks in the country's most scenic locations, throughout Western Australia, South Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria.

CAAPS has helped DHP to reduce administrative staffing requirements by five full time employees (FTEs) and save around half a million dollars in accounts processing.

Before using CAAPS, each of DHP’s 30-plus caravan parks received invoices, mostly from small suppliers, and processed them manually, mailing or faxing them back to head office in Adelaide.

CAAPS uses embedded business rules to read and interpret every faxed, scanned and emailed invoice from each park and processes them through the IT system, alerting DHP only when there are exceptions.

“All of this greatly reduces processing time, errors and cost," DHP CEO Grant Wilckens said. "It’s only when there’s an anomaly that the system alerts us, instead of having to check every invoice manually.”

Mr Wilckens said that CAAPS was implemented as part of a complete change process that included an overhaul of IT systems, driven from board level.

The system was chosen after recommendations from IT company Advance Business Consulting (ABC), which supports DHP’s SAP accounting software.

Scan Conversion Services set up around 30 business rules for different regional managers and different properties, including rules around capex vs opex and authorisation levels.

“To do this within the parameters of our existing system, SCS designed a lot of new code that is now benefitting everyone so from an R&D perspective there have been good outcomes,” Mr Wilckens said. “The design makes it easy to change the rules going forward without having to rewrite the code.”

CAAPS has also had a positive impact on the parks managers, who can now access real time information to give feedback to suppliers.

Previously, DHP would send Express Post bags full of invoices to Adelaide from around the country for processing by data entry staff.

“We’ve been able to remove significant amounts of postage, including around 40 Express Post bags a week,” Mr Wilckens said. “We now only need two accounts payable clerks where we had seven.

“We are in a pretty exciting business and we are focused on using industry-leading IT systems.

“CAAPS has given us an efficiency edge – we are definitely running with less overhead and lower cost structure. The saving from a cost perspective would have to be over half a million dollars.”

www.scanservices.com.au