Ocean County Utilities Authority Creates Efficiencies With Imagenow From Perceptive Software
In New Jersey's Ocean and Southern Monmouth Counties, when the water used goes down the drain and out of mind, that's when it becomes the business of the Ocean County Utilities Authority. Formed to protect and preserve the Barnegat Bay environment for current and future generations where 80 million gallons of water pass through the three wastewater treatment facilities operated by the OCUA each day, the OCUA has been honored with more than 53 awards for excellence from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) since 1983. But one area OCUA wanted to improve internally was accounts payable, where three accounts payable clerks processed up to 600 vouchers each month.
Until the purchase of ImageNow enterprise content management, imaging and workflow from Perceptive Software, accounts payable processes were frequently slowed by a paper-based approval process, an ineffective document imaging archival system, and software and hardware issues. OCUA implemented ImageNow in the purchasing, accounts payable and accounts receivable departments, integrating seamlessly with its host application, SAP, using Perceptive Software's patented LearnMode technology, allowing users to link documents to SAP records with a single click and retrieve documents directly from SAP — all without complex programming.
"ImageNow is the best solution for us because it is very end-user friendly, and it is easy to configure and install with our SAP system," said Randy Martin, OCUA systems administrator. "ImageNow is so easy to use that there was a low impact on end users, but a big impact on our business process. It was immediately perceived by everyone as an improvement."
OCUA converted more than 60,000 documents in its old system into ImageNow in just four hours. Within the first six months of using ImageNow, the staff worked their way through the backlog and has been caught up ever since.
Now employees scan vouchers into ImageNow and route them through ImageNow Workflow to gain approvals. When the approved voucher is routed to AP, clerks create the transaction within SAP from the imaged document and link the documents to the corresponding SAP record with one click, eliminating the need to manually key in documents and reducing the risk of errors. The seamless connection between ImageNow and SAP allows all documents related to an SAP record to be available instantly from SAP with a single click.
"Before using ImageNow, employees made copies of everything before sending it to AP because it was a couple of months before they had access to the documents again," said Heather Pushkal, OCUA systems analyst. "Now that all vouchers are scanned in ImageNow up-front, all end users do is point and click from SAP and they see everything they need immediately."
Gathering final approval signatures on vouchers used to be a painstaking process that wasted hours, but using ImageNow to electronically sign approval simplifies this task.
"Using ImageNow to approve vouchers saves about 16 hours per month for our executive director and eight hours for the executive assistant each month," Pushkal said. "You can imagine how happy they are with ImageNow."
Likewise, the time required to approve vouchers has been drastically reduced, as what could have taken weeks under a paper system can be completed in days or hours.
"We estimate that using ImageNow saves us 40 hours per month in approval time, and about 40 hours a month in scanning time," Pushkal added. "We eliminated the need for overtime as well."
Part of these time savings come from workflow efficiencies created by electronically routing documents. Using ImageNow Workflow, managers can easily keep track of documents in their queues and take action quickly, without leaving their desks. Documents stored in the central ImageNow repository are visible instantly to any authorized user, regardless of whose queue the document is in or what its status is. Instant access to documents at any time from anywhere eliminates the need to make extra copies, saving OCUA more than 2,000 photocopies per month.
"ImageNow is the star of our IT fleet right now," said David Stupar, OCUA director IT. "It's easy for us to maintain, and we are getting great feedback from our users."
To see how business leaders worldwide are putting up big ROI numbers with ImageNow, go to www.imagenow.com/success/roi-with-imagenow.psi.
About Perceptive Software
Since 1995 Perceptive Software has built enterprise content management software, including document management, document imaging and workflow solutions, to help organizations efficiently capture and organize virtually any document, then easily retrieve a precise page at the moment it's needed. More than 2,000 organizations in 30 countries rely on the ImageNow product suite to simplify their business processes.
SOURCE: Perceptive Software