Lava Systems Africa, an affinity partner of Canadian-based Open Text, and one of the companies within the Enterprise Content & Wireless (ECW) Group, today announced the availability of the latest version of its popular Livelink ECM - Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for use with SAP solutions that now incorporates an expanded set of preconfigured invoice processing scenarios, along with numerous other customer-driven enhancements.
VIM is a complete application for optimising vendor invoice processes in SAP applications, along with built-in reporting and analytics to continuously improve processes.
The new features in VIM Version 5.1 provide an easy way for companies to jump-start invoice process optimisation initiatives and realise significant return on investment in less time. Some of the most important issues that need to be considered when managing invoices concern how to handle exceptions such as missing goods receipts, incorrect pricing or incorrect tax. With the latest version of VIM, Open Text is providing 35 best-practice workflows for handling exceptions along with wizards to streamline the process of setting up a baseline configuration.
For existing customers using SAP solutions, such as Energen Corporation, VIM offers a cost-effective way to optimise business processes. At Energen, VIM enabled the company to reduce the number of steps required to process an invoice by 41%, from 14 down to nine. When factored across 60 000 invoices annually from 8 000 vendors, this represents a significant cost savings.
"We are fully optimised with a streamlined process flow that takes full advantage of our SAP application-based system," said Brunson White, Vice-President and CIO at Energen. "Our team now has time to take a more strategic approach and focus on high-value functions such as vendor analysis and negotiation. And we are also able to consistently take advantage of vendor discounts for rapid payment. One of the main reasons this was so successful is the Open Text application's tight integration with SAP solutions. It's impossible to tell when the SAP piece ends and the Open Text piece begins."
According to Brunson, VIM has also helped to significantly increase overall vendor satisfaction with Energen, by simplifying interaction with the company and ensuring rapid payment. Energen has also deployed VIM's built-in vendor self-service portal that lets vendors use the Web to securely check the status of invoices payments, to provide missing information or to review purchase orders.
Other new capabilities in the latest version of VIM include:
* Enhanced vendor self-service portal capabilities;
* Enhancements to VIM Analytics to increase performance and offer more reporting flexibility;
* New document processing workflows; and
* New diagnostic tools to speed up configuration and deployment.
"These new features in VIM reduce the cost and time needed for customers to optimise their procure-to-pay processes, while giving them deeper insight into the performance of their supply chain," commented Patrick Barnert, Vice-President for SAP Applications at Open Text. "This is a proven, robust application that meets today's IT challenges around security, scalability, and performance. It helps customers reduce costs, improve cash management and comply with corporate governance regulations."
VIM delivers efficiency, visibility, compliance
For many organisations, the process of receiving paper invoices, routing for data entry, resolving problems, and reporting is typically inefficient. Often, most of the time spent on these processes involves manual labour and can be very costly.
To optimise vendor invoice handling, VIM routes problem invoices to appropriate individuals for resolution and approval. It includes elements for Web-based self-service for vendors and approval capabilities for internal users who don't normally use SAP solutions.
VIM also provides increased user adoption of SAP applications, which helps maximise return on investment for SAP solutions. VIM uses imaging, workflow, and best-practice design to increase efficiency. An open design makes it possible to accept invoices electronically as well as via paper. Purchase orders, goods receipts, invoice transaction screens, invoice images, and transaction notes are all linked in one place to ensure timely problem resolution with a minimum of effort.
Organisations using VIM, including many Fortune 1000 companies, have significantly improved efficiencies in invoice processing, and enjoy benefits such as dramatically lower cost per invoice, improved on-time payment performance, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, more captured discounts, reduced duplicate invoices and payments, better reputation with suppliers and more leverage for terms and price negotiation.
For further information, please contact Ray Dalgarno, Lava Systems Africa: tel 011 675-7193, fax 011 675-4075, e-mail rayd@lavasystems.co.za
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