Invoices circulate throughout the company, sometimes never reaching payment, sales has a perpetual backlog in accepting invoices. In addition, there was an apparent lack of control over the process, and more and more employees were involved in the workflow. Sound familiar? We encountered such a problem at one of our clients. We were asked to help, so to specifics:

What was the issue?

The company was growing rapidly, market shares were increasing, turnover was growing, but unfortunately at the same time the costs of running the business were also rising. At the end of the day, it turned out that profits were not growing at all in line with the owners’ expectations. The company started with a core process. Could anything else be done? A quick look at the organisational chart and the choice was Back – Office – but how to go about it?

And this is where we come in. To start with some data. Back – Office departments generate up to 20% of all company costs. This is quite a lot, let’s say a company spends PLN 2,000,000 on salaries per year, then PLN 400,000 of this falls on Back Office departments. The same applies to other costs.

Where we started – at the very first meeting with the company’s CEO, it became clear that the back office had been completely ignored in the main process optimisation project. When asked if they had already implemented an electronic workflow, the confident answer was yes. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, it turned out that this solution does not quite work. Yes, invoices are scanned into the system, but approval still takes place on paper. In addition, a paper archive is still being created. We asked the employees if they were satisfied with the workflow process, 75 per cent of those asked said they were not, but no one has time to deal with it. Classics😊

Some data:

1. Transport company
2. 5000 cost invoices per month entered into the system
3. 640 hours per month dedicated to this process
4. F-K system – Comarch Optima
5. 4 people dedicated to the process of document circulation and entering invoices into the system
6. Lack of any reporting system on what stage an invoice is at and where the bottlenecks are in the process

As a result, leaders in the back office had no control over the process and did not quite know what they could do about it.

What has been achieved?

1. We implemented an electronic document workflow and an optical character recognition application
2. We integrated both OCR into the system with Optima, where all we had to do was check the read-out and post the invoice

Results:

1. ROI – one month
2. 400 hours per month saved in the process thanks to OCR
3. 0 paper invoices in circulation
4. People previously inputting invoices were given other tasks, thus increasing the company’s productivity in other areas
5. We gave leaders the tools to be in control of the process and employees finally felt supported by management