Lovell had identified a familiar problem: when purchase invoices do not match with delivery tickets, the query process takes several days to resolve and with a lengthy process of photocopying, retrieving and posting out invoices to regional offices and back again once resolved. Involving a similar process for the surveyors was the management of some ‘open book’ schemes where back-up invoices were required to support applications against costs incurred.

Aiming to put end-users in control of the data, remove reams of photocopying and speed up the flow of invoice queries, Lovell held a kick off meeting with COINS in July last year to discuss COINS Information Manager (CIM), an electronic document management system that is integrated into the COINS suite of solutions. CIM enables users to easily – and in some cases automatically – access scanned documents related to data they are currently viewing in a COINS module session.

By October Lovell had procured hardware, installed and tested CIM and were live on scanning purchase invoices linked to COINS. Harry Toor, System Accountant observed, ‘the first phase of our CIM implementation went well, we now have a much faster internal response to query resolution, minutes rather than days and we have directly reduced our photocopying and postage costs.’

Phase 2 CIM Workflow is being tested – this has the ability to automatically route query invoices through Head Office account supervisors and out to the regional offices concerned. Workflow is triggered either by a commercial hold code against the invoice or an invoice being registered in COINS. The final approval in the Workflow removes the hold code in COINS allowing the invoice to be paid in the normal way. Phase 3 will be Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of the scanned images which create a transaction in COINS automatically.

Harry concluded, ‘all users who have access to COINS can now retrieve documents directly from COINS ledgers on demand and this linkage is really the key differentiator from other systems.’ He continued, ‘we have seen immediate rewards both tangible and non-tangible and anticipate greater benefits when the workflow is implemented. We expect to achieve a direct return on our investment within 12 to 18 months.’

Bluestone in contrast to Lovell were outsourcing document management to deal with approximately 140,000 purchase invoices per annum, but there was no indexing of documents or integration to transactions in COINS so retrieval was desperately slow.

Recalling the recent implementation Andy Martin, Financial Systems Manager commented, ‘phase 1 has gone very well. After procuring the required hardware, we went straight into setup and configuration of the test and live system. The testing and training of our staff was achieved in two weeks and we went live on 30th October. We were delighted that input was only slower for the first month, while staff found their way.’

Andy is aware that further benefits can be accrued with the implementation of Workflow, OCR and the full rollout of the CIM Browser and Image viewer throughout the business. However Andy says, ‘the savings in retrieval time and costs of external scanning alone made CIS a winner all round, we expect to recoup our investment within a 3 year time frame.’ He continued, ‘it made perfect sense to use CIM as the real added value is the integration to COINS and we have the added bonus of a one-stop-shop service.’