Ever since Datacap was acquired by IBM in August 2010, we at the newly blue-tinted Datacap, an IBM Company, have been discovering connections with IBM software that we had forgotten that we had. The IBMers who are welcoming us into their world have been touting the synergies of combining capture with the entire portfolio of IBM ECM products and beyond. And there may be no better example of this than the accounts payable application at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.
A couple of years ago, one of Datacap (and IBM’s) most innovative channel partners, EKI Consulting of Chicago, won the opportunity to help Goodyear automate its accounts payable process just ahead of a centralization project that effectively doubled the volume of paper invoices.
EKI and Datacap installed Taskmaster APT to automate the keying of invoice data with OCR and other document automation features. Taskmaster then passed accounts payable invoice data to SAP for payment and indexed images to an IBM FileNet P8 repository for efficient storage and retrieval.
Furthermore, EKI helped to seal the deal by proposing that they build an invoice approval workflow on Goodyear’s existing IBM Lotus Notes implementation, which they did. So now invoices without purchase orders, that require departmental approvals before payment can be made, are routed through Lotus Notes email with special custom screens that streamline the approval process.
“Our automated accounts payable workflow solution has helped us take a process that used to require 14 steps and five to seven days to complete, and reduce it to a process that can be completed in a single day with 9 primarily automated steps,” attests Jami Dunphy, the Goodyear AP Manager who oversaw the implementation.
The application was written up in Integrated Solutions magazine late in 2008, from which Datacap recently created a highlights document with the key points summarized for a quick read. Click here to access it and you’ll see that the route to accounts payable automation – and extraordinary cost savings and process improvements – can be entirely a Blue Highway.
