Document management can reduce finance processing costs and improve compliance
23rd May 2005 There has been explosive growth in the uptake of document management systems fuelled by decreasing hardware costs and significantly enhanced software capabilities. Not only can these systems improve productivity and reduce costs but they can also support more effective compliance processes.
Document management system suppliers are enjoying boom conditions as finance departments are finally running out of places to store their documents and the costs of traditional paper handling processes are spiralling. Tony Bray, Director of Version One, a rapidly growing document management and imaging company confirmed the trend in a discussion with FSN's editor last week.
Version One, moved into the Deloitte European Technology Fast 500 Awards last year and is becoming a leading supplier of document management and imaging solutions integrated with leading finance and ERP packages. Bray puts the growth of the market down to falling computer storage prices and significant improvements in scanning hardware. "Five to ten years ago document management systems were relatively expensive but with falling disk storage prices companies hardly notice the cost of the hardware now" he told FSN. "Even terabytes of data storage are affordable and whereas document scanners used to be clunky and expensive they too have improved and fallen in price." This has been a gift to software houses like Version One which author their own software products and can now make the technology accessible to companies of all sizes. "Our document management software integrates with Oracle and SAP at one end and is equally viable when linked to Sage products," he says.
It is in the accounting space that Version One has made its mark. Philip Bonnier, Head of Financial Systems Development at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, explained, "We looked at a number of possible suppliers of a new Accounting system for the Trust, three of which proposed Oracle Financials software integrating into Version One's document management solution, DbArchive. We were reassured by the fact that DbArchive is a well established document management solution with Oracle Financials."
The Trust - one of the largest and best-known NHS trusts - and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust are transforming their entire accounting and procurement processes with a new document management and imaging system from Version One.
According to Bray, most customers see a payback on their investment in document management within a period of three to six months. The savings come through a variety of measures which reduce paper handling, storage and distribution connected with everyday financial transactions. For example, in-bound supplier invoices can be scanned and in conjunction with sophisticated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can be automatically associated with supplier records and purchase orders. "It is not just a case of retrieving accounting entries", says Bray, "the ability to retrieve actual images of key documents is more helpful." Infact the Version One's integration with accounting systems in one direction and email systems in another means that images can be despatched to anyone who needs to know very easily. In addition, Version One's workflow capabilities support document management in the broadest sense so that documents can be routed automatically between individuals in a joined up authorisation process. There are several ways of handling in-bound documents ranging from manual indexing through to bar-coding documents and completely automated OCR. Bray says that Version One's use of Artificial Intelligence techniques overcomes almost any obstacle to automatic processing. "OCR has greatly improved" says Bray.
Outward bound documentation is usually an easier proposition because the system generated documents are a known commodity. Indexing and retrieval of images becomes very straightforward. However, Tony Bray acknowledges that most customers are nervous about moving away from hard copy printed material until they have the confidence in their electronic storage and backup processes."
Time savings and cost savings are quickly realised as the number of people handling documents is greatly reduced and documents no longer have to be archived to warehouses only to be physically retrieved again at a later date.
In the face of increasing regulatory pressure document management systems provide useful additional support. Whereas a physical chain of paper handling events does not necessarily leave a trace the same is not true of a document handling system. Every movement of a document can be date and time stamped in the audit trail along with a record of the user of the document. Auditors can interrogate the document management system and retrace its history.
The view that document management systems are unreliable and expensive is truly out of date. These systems can save almost any organisation very significant sums of money and when the benefits of process efficiencies, productivity and responsiveness are coupled with improved compliance the whole business case becomes very compelling.
