Nichols plc, famous for its Vimto, Panda and Sunkist brands, has moved all its financial operations to a shared services centre with the help of electronic document management and imaging author, Version One. Nichols' new shared services centre has replaced financial departments at six different operating companies across the UK .
Allan Doyle, IT Manager for Nichols says, "Shared services would have been totally unworkable without Version One's solutions. Each operating company's financial department had up to twelve storage cabinets full of documents. The shared services office simply couldn't accommodate all of these. By electronically archiving all documents, physical storage has been eliminated, making the move to shared services possible. Version One's technology has also solved the problem of how to get invoices approved quickly and easily when approvers are scattered all over the country."
Nichols implemented Version One's technology into its Sage Line 500 system, enabling shared services to create, deliver, store, retrieve and authorise the whole group's financial documents directly from Sage. With the new technology in place, Nichols electronically archives all incoming and outgoing financial documents including purchase orders, invoices, remittance advices, statements, contracts and payslips. Version One's technology also enables the electronic authorisation of purchase invoices via Nichols' already established Wide Area Network (WAN), replacing the time-consuming and costly method of posting invoices for approval.
Doyle says, "Staff time is now much better utilised. Staff no longer need to hunt around in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes for financial documents, make multiple copies of documents and then manually process each and every one of them. All documents are now instantly retrievable at a click of a button and are electronically processed and delivered within seconds", says Doyle. As a direct result of implementing Version One's technology, we have redeployed up to 70 per cent of the accounts staff's time on value added activities!"
"Another benefit is that Version One's solutions have removed the administration overheads of processing, photocopying, enveloping, posting and manually filing every document. With 20,000 sales invoices being produced every month just for soft drinks vending company, Cabana, the cost and efficiency savings are considerable! Across the business, we are saving over £100,000 per annum."
