Eliminate Paper From Invoice Processes

$1.2 billion Hanson Pipe & Precast, Inc. accelerated billing procedures by integrating output management and ECM (enterprise content management) software to generate and route invoice images instead of paper.

Have you ever thought about how much it costs your company to manage paper? Forget for a moment about the expense of the paper itself and the consumables used to print and copy documents — those costs are incidental. The real money comes into play when it comes to physically handling all of the documents your business generates and the inefficiencies inherent in paper processes. For example, according to a 2004 study by Coopers and Lybrand, it costs an organization $30 to properly file a document. Furthermore, despite the latest paper filing methodologies, an average of 7.5% of those documents will be lost or misplaced at one point or another. The average cost to locate that lost document is $122, and if the file is never found, it will cost an organization another $220 in labor to reproduce that same document.

Statistics such as these are providing many businesses with the motivation to begin eliminating paper from their everyday business processes. However, moving toward a paperless office is easier for some businesses than others. Some companies are unable to begin digitizing certain processes because they are shackled by the limitations of existing legacy systems. Hanson Pipe & Precast, Inc. thought it was one of these companies, but it found a way to get the electronic invoicing capabilities out of its existing ERP (enterprise resource planning) system by integrating it with upgraded output management and ECM technologies.