Watch this video case study to see how Wildman Business Group took advantage of User Friendly Consulting®’s expertise with ABBYY FlexiCapture to automate their invoice processing!
In 1952, Rex Wildman purchased a dry cleaners in Warsaw, Indiana, founding what would grow into Wildman Business Group.
At Wildman Business Group, it’s our mission to develop people to their fullest potential. One of the key things that we look for in that is vendor relationships, such as ABBYY, and User Friendly Consulting®, who’s partnered with ABBYY to come in and help us develop efficiencies that make us more profitable.
But Wildman’s expanding business meant a steep rise in invoices. By 2015, over 4,000 invoices a month were being manually entered into the company’s ERP system.
At Wildman Business Group, you get used to taking on more. There’s always something more to do, another project to work on. We finally decided we were going to do a web portal for our customer employees to order corporate apparel, and when that happened, wow! There was a lot of invoices.
Pretty soon, it took staff over 50 hours a week to deal with all of these invoices. They had to print each one, check its PO, and then manually enter it into our Sage 100 system. Then, on top of that, they had to sort and file the invoices into lots of filing cabinets. Since manual entry can mean a lot of mistakes, we had a lot of verification.
Plus, printed invoices were stacking up on everyone’s desks. Not to mention the storage space that we needed for all of those invoices. So we either had to add to our accounts payable staff, or we had to automate. And in this case, we decided that automation was our best option.
We interviewed several vendors, and I was still just unconvinced that they would be able to meet our unique needs. Then we made a lucky find, and we found Travis Spangler, the general manager of User Friendly Consulting®. He introduced us to ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices.
ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices is ideally suited for Wildman Business Group. Its trainability and flexibility, its on-the-fly training, let us meet the needs that this unique business offered to us.
But first off, our goal is to make this as simple as possible to understand. What we did, is we saved a copy of the data Sage 100, and we saved a copy of the invoice to SharePoint Online.
What Travis and his team promised, they delivered in about a week, and the installation of ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices onto our server went very smoothly. Then we had to build in all of our business logic, and that whole process, and the integration, went very well.
After that, we fine-tuned the product to accommodate our top 20 vendors. Then, we used FlexiCapture’s auto training feature to enable it to handle the remainder. Pretty much in no time, we were up and running smoothly.
All invoice data is automatically captured by FlexiCapture from the invoice images, and uploaded into our Sage 100 ERP system. The images themselves, then, are sent straight into SharePoint. The invoices are automatically routed to the correct people for approval, and then the system validates the invoice data according to our custom rules.
FlexiCapture’s accuracy means that we spend a lot less time validating the data. We used to spend about 50 hours a week processing invoices. Now we’re down to about 40 hours a week processing an ever growing number of invoices. That means that our staff now has time to spend on more profitable tasks.
Since the software is working so well, and we have a strong relationship with User Friendly Consulting®, we can’t wait to start the next phase of our project. We’d like to use this to automate our vendor statements, and also help apply customer payment.