Inforay at VW Telecom

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Company profile

VW Telecom is a Dutch company with about 1200 employee that work in four daughter companies in Amersfoort, Houten, and Apeldoorn. VW Telecom is part of the VWS group and it is the most important designer and builder of mobile communication networks in the Netherlands. They design, build, and maintain infrastructures that are tuned to the demands and needs of the customer.

Problem

VW Telecom has a centralized accounts payable department in Drachten. This is where all the invoices are coming in for the entire VW Telecom organization. Payment of an invoice only occurs after it has been approved by the responsible manager, who is often at a different location. The accounts payable department however, is responsible for paying the invoices on time.

In the past, accounts payable made a copy of each invoice and sent it to the manager concerned. After sending the invoice out, the accounts payable employees had no insight in the progress of the invoice approval process. This resulted in many discussions with suppliers, who wanted to know when their invoices were going to be paid, and great stress within the organization to get an adequate answer.

Solution

Since September 2004 VW Telecom uses the Inforay technology to make the processing of purchase invoices more efficient. Accounts payable can now track every invoice while it travels through the organization. They can see who is processing the invoice and in what stage of the approval process it is.

The invoices are sent to the right person as a scanned document. The scans can be accessed online, so it is no longer necessary to send the actual invoice.

An invoice first reaches the buyer who can verify if the invoice amount corresponds to the delivered goods. Once the buyer has approved the invoice, the system automatically sends it to the right manager, taking into account which manager is authorized to approve the invoice amount. Once the manager has approved the invoice, it is automatically added to the payment batch and then automatically paid.

It is also possible to manually add the invoice to the payment batch if accounts payable wants to perform specific operations or if the payment term must be guarded separately. Of course, the system also supports the procedure that follows if an invoice cannot be approved or if a credit note must be received first.

In addition, the Inforay technology makes it possible to add specific additional Monitors to the standard Monitors that support the process at a later stage. These Monitors can, for example, provide more detailed information about the invoices.

Results

The Inforay purchase invoice verification Monitors enable the accounts payable employees to track the flow of invoices through the organization. In addition, the decentralized employees receive every bit of relevant information about the invoices, making the approval process easier and faster. For example, an employee can retrieve the corresponding purchase order, or project data, which makes it easy to compare invoices with actual orders.

In addition, it is very easy to extend the standard Monitors with new information, making it possible to quickly fill changing information needs.

Success factors

• The invoices always go to the right person, in accordance with the specified authorization chart. Each person has instant access to relevant information to help evaluate an invoice.

• The approval process is now completely transparent and much less time-consuming for accounts payable and the decentralized employees, because they have access to all the information in the Monitors, and no longer need to go through binders or other systems.

• It takes little time to modify the existing overviews or to add new ones.

• Those people that want to create their own Monitors, can do so themselves after they have attended a day-long training course at Inforay. You do not need a technician for this and that saves a lot of time.

• The solution was ready within a lead time of one and a half months.

• The current system can easily and quickly be extended to a broader workflow application, that makes it possible to manage the entire document processing traffic, internally as well as externally. This will soon result in cost reduction with regard to man hours.