VolkerRail

VolkerRail experienced challenges in the areas of invoice storage, retrieval and approval. Unnecessary time was spent to travel to a central location as well as manually finding and filing invoices. At the same time the manual nature of filling and finding invoices lead to lost invoices. Since invoices were not immediately and easily available and visits to the invoice storage facility was done on an ad hoc basis invoices could age and project cost reconciliations could become out of date compromising financial control on accruals as well as project budgeting processes.

After evaluating various document imaging solutions, including a native adapter for the incumbent financial system, VolkerRail selected a combination of Fujitsu workgroup scanners, KnowledgeLake and Microsoft SharePoint. The priority project was to deliver a solution to scan and host purchase ledger invoices online for a geographically dispersed audience. On successful roll-out of a group wide purchase ledger imaging solution, other processes within the accounting and human resources departments are planned to be automated as well.

The solution allows the purchase ledger team to code invoices in the accounting system and then scan and index them into SharePoint. Users work in teams of two sharing a small footprint Fujitsu workgroup scanner (fi-6140) per team. The speed and ease-of-use of the scanner (that supports automatic duplex scanning at up to 80 sides per minute) allow users to process up to 300 invoices per day using KnowledgeLake. Scanning rules in KnowledgeLake include bar code recognition, page separation, blank page detection and various imaging enhancements. During indexing, KnowledgeLake allows users to see the image and relevant properties side by side and require that only the coded reference number of the invoice be entered. Other properties are loaded and validated automatically from the backend accounting system. On average it takes users 25 seconds to process an invoice from paper to SharePoint.