|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Knowledge Management Questar Callon St. Mary Land Energy Company Evarts- Tremaine- Flicker Fidelity Exploration All Studies |
Case StudySt. Mary Land & ExplorationSt. Mary Land and Exploration uses DocVue.AP's Imaging, Bridge, and Workflow solution to automate the Accounts Payable process throughout its five remote office locations with one centralized system.Business Challenge: Improve and automate the decentralized Accounts Payable process to gain business efficiencies and to reduce approval time, shipping costs and time, and other inherent costs of the current process. Solution: DocVue.AP suite of products including DocVue Imaging, DocVue Bridge, DocVue Workflow and the DocVue Document Manager electronic document repository. Background: St. Mary Land & Exploration Company is engaged in the exploration, development, acquisition and production of natural gas and crude oil in five core areas in the United States. They are headquartered in Denver, Colorado with offices in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Billings, Montana; Shreveport and Lafayette, Louisiana. Given their size and distributed areas of operation, St. Mary's Accounts Payable system was becoming burdensome - and expensive, to operate. We made photocopies of nearly every single invoice, work ticket, and piece of correspondence," explained Garry Wilkening, VP of Administration and Controller at St. Mary. "Each piece of paper was then shipped around the office for engineer and/or manager's approvals, then over-nighted to Denver to be entered into our systems. Our engineers spent too much time shuffling through, or looking for paper. This took away from the time they could spend doing what was meaningful to them and to our company." Implementation and Customization: Although implementing the DocVue Document Manager repository was seen as a good start to solving their problems, St. Mary needed a little more to convince their employees that Electronic Document Management was a good idea. "We felt that if we were going to convince our engineers that this was the way to go, we had to ensure that it was at least as fast as their "old way" and that it would save time and money in other areas as well," said Wilkening. Full Circle Systems' DocVue.AP solution was implemented along with DocVue Imaging scanning software. This integrated solution allowed St. Mary's employees to review documents, process approvals, and pay invoices all within one system while remaining synchronized with their existing Accounts Payable software. Some of the key features of this solution include easily customizable workflows in DocVue and a bridge to Paradigm Technology's Excalibur EDGE™ accounting system. Excalibur™ Integration: Working closely with St. Mary's business and technical representatives, Full Circle Systems configured the DocVue Bridge to allow users to code their invoices directly into Excalibur from their DocVue system. This enabled the two systems to be perpetually in-sync and eliminated any requirements to re-key the same pertinent information in two different places. Simultaneously the system allows non-accounting users like engineers, to view how the invoices have been coded while looking at an image of the invoice. "This was a key element in our decision," said Wilkening, "entering information twice just didn't make sense. Now we only have to key it in once and it's automatically synced between systems." Batch Processing: Because many of the engineers do their approvals from home or from the field, DocVue.AP had to be fast and efficient via the Internet. Full Circle Systems initiated batch processing so engineers could view one image while other images were downloading in the background. In this way entire batches can also be submitted to DocVue.AP for processing, rather than handling one invoice at a time. "I told my engineers that I would personally test the speed of doing approvals from home. I used my slow 28k modem and found that I was just as fast, if not faster, than working with the paper," said Wilkening. "When I was done, the information was already on to the next step. My employees didn't have to wait for me to bring the paper in or ship it out to another office." Customizable Workflows: Like most organizations, St. Mary's invoices came from a variety of sources. "We needed to be able to route different invoices, based on a variety of criteria, to different people within our organization," explained Dottie Lopez, Accounting Manager at St. Mary. "Full Circle Systems designed customizable workflows that I can easily define or structure depending on the criteria we need." The workflows allow the Accounts Payable process to "flow" throughout the organization from receipt-to-payment and beyond, regardless of where invoices are generated from, location of offices, or availability of personnel - without paper. Results: After working with DocVue.AP for two years, St. Mary Land & Exploration is very happy with the results "We have accomplished exactly what we had set out to do - save time and money, while automating our Accounts Payable process," said Wilkening. "Through automation and the Internet, we can reliably manage our process and provide better service to our suppliers who want to know the status of their invoices. In addition, we can provide access of business-critical information to our auditors, engineers planning new wells, and other employees and partners who can benefit from this knowledge." Back To Case Studies |
|||
|
|
||||
| © 2003 Full Circle Systems Inc., All Rights Reserved | ||||
| Calgary Office: (403) 215-0055 | info@fullcirclesystems.com 1-800-686-8978 |
Denver Office: (303) 697-2050 | ||