Stuart Plumbing were looking at document management solutions when their rapid expansion enabled them to open an 8th location. The growth had a big impact on their finance departments workload. With only two staff members manually processing in excess of 2,000 invoices a month from a multitude of different suppliers, it was a time consuming and laborious task that was reaching breaking point. Stuart Plumbing knew that they really needed to think about some sort of automation platform to ease the pressure, and sought the advice of their long-standing print and software supplier.

Automation for efficiency and accuracy

A full audit was carried out, and having identified the key pain points, the experts in business workflows proposed DocuWare as a document management solution (DMS) to automate the invoice entry process. The system has been integrated into the capturing and classification solution ancora Software.

Three things were critical for the project: removing the manual tasks, streamlining processes within the finance department, and most importantly highlighting and resolving errors quickly for improved accuracy. With the scoping phase complete, the transition to the new solution was straight forward, easily integrating into the company’s existing EDI software, and the finance team adapting quickly to the new digitization. By automating a very manual and labour-intensive process, the company could reduce its invoicing time by about 30-40%. In addition to the time savings and increased accuracy, Stuart Plumbing has also been able to reduce the amount of paper being used, as invoices are entered straight into the system without being printed first, further reducing costs.