Nissan Europe

Nissan had a business imperative to cease a Business Process Outsourcing contract that included paper courier and scanning services. The impact of terminating the contract would apply to nine Regional Business Units (RBU's) scattered throughout Europe supporting a total of 28 businesses.

Aside from the scope of the challenge the timeliness of implementation was also critical because any variance would mean that the entire outsourcing contract may have needed a further extension with a significant financial impact. The implementation plan needed to be comprehensive in the sense that it had to cater for configuration, user training and system handovers to local teams within a delivery period of less than five weeks.

"After standardising our European accounts payable processes and systems over the past three years we needed a solution to in-source the scanning and classification of financial documents back into our European regional businesses.

Before we implemented the solution a financial document would be received at the regional businesses, routed, sorted and classified and then sent for outsourced scanning and indexing on a daily basis. Once scanned the coded batch would be returned to our central accounts payable centre for import into the accounts payable system. The outsourced process meant that it could take up to five days for documents to reach our accounts payable system.

By deploying the Fujitsu and KnowledgeLake solution we now have a simple and robust solution that has reduced the turnaround time for payment by up to six working days. Furthermore our 'supplier paid on time' metric was increased by 16% within the first three months after the system went live."

- Maria Nagy, Financial Projects, Nissan Europe Finance

The solution enables regional teams to scan information locally and is designed to deal with volumes of around 1000 multi-page financial documents per day.

Implementation of the solution and roll-out to the nine European Sites took less than five weeks which meant that contractual deadlines were met and that it was not necessary to extend outsourcing arrangements. The roll-out plan included onsite training and installation which was completed within as little as one day per location.

Multilingual operating instructions and training manuals were used to ensure that regional users were able and confident to use the solution. The implementation plan also made provision for business continuity by providing a Fujitsu scanner 'hot-spare' at each of the key sites.

The solution deployed included Fujitsu 6130 workgroup scanners for every business unit together with software to ensure the safe transmission of the documents to the accounts payable system. KnowledgeLake Capture and Branch Capture Server technologies were introduced to meet the requirements for quality scanning, secure and timely transmission. The Fujitsu workgroup scanners were selected based on their small footprint, ease of use and the scanning volumes expected. The ease of use aspect enabled fast training of finance and back office administration staff and received positive feedback.

Solution Components

KnowledgeLake Capture Server

• Installed to virtualised hardware at the Nissan network operating centre in Sunderland, England.
• Configured to receive a document feed from each RBU and then relay the feed to the Nissan invoice approval system.
• Audits all RBU feeds and guarantees delivery of each document to the invoice approval system.

KnowledgeLake Branch Capture Server

• Installed at each RBU as a regional scanning server
• Scanner installed to a desktop that met Branch Capture Server specifications
• Branch Capture Server in each RBU controls the timing and bandwidth usage of each feed to Sunderland

Fujitsu 6130 Workgroup Scanner

• The solution utilised the Fujitsu 6130 because of the small desk footprint and its barcode recognition as well as double sided scanning capability
• The scanners were configured to use 'name rules' after the barcode that ensured the output document followed the correct route whilst under the control of the accounts payable team
• Multilingual training material to cover barcode configuration, double sided scanning and greyscale eradication techniques were provided

Finance managers are in control of the scanning process which means that they can fast track the urgent payment of an invoice to accounts payable team in India within a matter of minutes.

Key metrics

"The solution that Dynamyx proposed was cost effective and enabled Nissan to seamlessly move to the new scanning process and terminate the outsourcing contract. Furthermore the solution was considered to be easy to use and maintain - underpinned by the Fujitsu Workgroup Scanners that required very little training."

- Maria Nagy, Financial Projects, Nissan Europe Finance