While the healthcare system may need an overhaul, one thing we ought to be grateful for is modern medicine’s ability to save lives and heal those of us unfortunate enough to suffer severe illness or trauma. You don’t have to be a healthcare patient – or even a regular watcher of the TV show “House” – to know that the science and technology of healthcare have evolved to extraordinary levels.
Over the past 30 years, Invacare Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio suburb Elyria, has contributed to the technology of healing by providing the wheelchairs, oxygen machines, and adjustable hospital beds for home-based healthcare and rehabilitation. The company has grown from a small, privately-owned wheelchair manufacturer into a publicly-owned Fortune 1000 leader in home and long term care.
With 30 factories worldwide, and thousands of vendors, Invacare’s Accounts Payable department had grown into a formidable processing center, receiving more than 150,000 invoices a year. Each invoice needs to be entered into the company’s ERP system, Oracle Financials, for approval and payment, and then saved for seven years by state law.
Doing all of this manually was keeping a team of 10 very busy sorting, typing and filing, plus temps when necessary. So Invacare began researching a way to automate the process. With thousands of different vendors, each featuring a unique invoice layout, Invacare needed a solution that would provide a cost-effective way to set-up new invoice layouts. Many of the solutions Invacare looked at involved costly and time-consuming programming to set up “templates” for each invoice and if they wanted to capture line items, it was even more expensive.
Not so with Datacap’s Taskmaster APT, an application built for accounts payable. Invacare selected Taskmaster APT for several reasons: Datacap licenses per concurrent user, not by image, setting up new invoice layouts is fast and easy, with no programming required, and Taskmaster is tightly integrated with the OnBase document management system that Invacare relies on for image storage.
With Taskmaster APT powering the AP department, Invacare has accelerated their process. “Processing is much faster and invoices are almost immediately available as electronic images. Each AP clerk can call up an invoice on their screen from the OnBase repository and answer vendor inquiries during the initial call,” says Seth Linebrink, Invacare’s Manager of Financial Reporting and Accounts Payable. “As a result, we are delivering better customer service for not only internal inquiries, but to our vendor community as well.”
So in one small way, Datacap is helping to streamline the healthcare system. You can read the full Invacare case study here. Invacare’s AP automation with Taskmaster APT is a perfect example of a Phase Three capture system. To understand what Phase Three capture is, read Kevin Craine’s new paper, “The Five Phases of Capture.” Download your copy here.
