Real life intern experience #3 Chris Turner

After just finishing my second year of university, I can appreciate the value that real world business experience will have on my job prospects after my final year. This and my keen interest in marketing, made working in the ReadSoft marketing team an ideal way to spend my summer holidays.

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Whilst working at ReadSoft I am involved in a project to create an end-to-end business model for an online invoicing solution. As part of this my main focus is on the marketing, which includes developing a microsite, social media marketing, editing promotional videos and creating direct email campaigns. Below I will explain what was involved in each of these experiences what I have learnt from each.

1) Developing a microsite
Using a CMS, I created a microsite for the ReadSoft Online solution. This involved designing images to use as linked buttons for the site. I learnt from this that branding is extremely important and developed web editing skills.

2) Social media marketing
My task was to post 2 different social media utterances a day. I was given the passwords to the ReadSoft Twitter account and to the company LinkedIn account. I used websites such as Quora and the UK Business forums which I wasn’t familiar with before. From this I learnt the importance of social media marketing, how to use it effectively and how to report on results.

3) Promotional video editing
My task was to edit an interview with a customer who currently uses ReadSoft Online so that it flows and creates a promotional video for ReadSoft Online. From this I was able to develop my video editing skills, as well as understanding ReadSoft Online from a customer’s point of view.

4) Direct email campaigns
I used a world leading email platform to create email campaigns to go out to a large database of potential customers. My campaign was designed to gather information about the prospects circumstances and the tone used made it feel as if it spoke to the potential customer personally.

I have really enjoyed my internship at ReadSoft. I feel that I have slotted into the team well and got on well with the other interns. The experience has been extremely value and will greatly assist me with my future career.

The government spending deficit: a national issue with a local solution

UK councils currently face a total reduction of £4.7 billion in spending, which means they have to start making savings immediately, and that for many authorities means endangering frontline services.

But what if local authorities could save £80million straight away? The Audit Commission recommended local authorities facing deep cuts should review their financial planning and lessen the impact on service users by improving efficiencies. ReadSoft views automation of invoice processing in local authority finance departments as a sure fire way to improve efficiency, reduce costs and deliver better cash flow.

South Ayrshire Council is a case in point. Before it spoke to ReadSoft it was processing up to 150,000 invoices per annum. The process was decentralised with processing performed in 130+ separate sections. Each year these invoices were processed for a variety of more than 7,000 different suppliers using traditional paper-based methods. The resultant processes were labour intensive and left much room for improvement when interrogating and auditing.

South Ayrshire Council needed to modernise the Accounts Payable function in order to reduce costs and streamline processes and so turned to ReadSoft for help to not only increase the simplicity and efficiency in finance; but ensure that these procedures would become better-controlled. Today, rather than focusing on invoice processing; South Ayrshire Council is now able to concentrate on core business. Councillor Robin Reid, Portfolio Holder for Resources and Performance, says: “South Ayrshire Council is committed to achieving Best Value for our residents and realising a rapid return on our investment in ReadSoft is one way that we can be at the forefront of business transformation ensuring we meet the needs of our stakeholders and residents alike.”

Learn more about how South Ayrshire achieved this here.

For rapid reaction to the need for cuts, single tier, county and district councils can also quickly and easily deploy software as a service (SaaS) models in line with statements made by Tariq Rashad, Home Officer Lead IT Architect on the value of looking at Cloud based IT.

Local authorities can also pursue that option with ReadSoft Online, running invoice automation on an OPEX basis. That is a great way to start securing improved efficiency and really reduce costs.

To learn more about how your local authority can improve click here to download the free Local Government Efficiency Report from ReadSoft.

What’s happening with shared service centres?

At the moment, Shared Services tend largely to achieve cost-reduction by pooling resources and by locating in areas where labour is cheap.  But there are a number of stumbling blocks that can make a Shared Service Centre (SSC) solution slower and more expensive than the original process. Organisations considering an SSC approach for their business need to ready themselves for an evolutionary process of modifications, defined by metrics and targets based upon today’s performance levels when compared against industry benchmarks.

They need sound strategies regarding the setting-up, development and expansion of their processes, with an emphasis on cost and volume, which may include securing process outsourcing capabilities, efforts to reduce errors, education of  staff  and process standardisation. These are all factors that suggest process automation as a positive measure, and yet this is one area where we see SSCs failing to fully reap the benefits of the latest technology.

More than 8,500 enterprises around the globe automate financial document processes, such as data entry, document classification, information matching against ERP systems, document work­flows and more with ReadSoft to achieve faster and less expensive document processing. Time Warner Cable, is one company that engaged with ReadSoft to update its internal operations and streamline its accounts payable function, making our automated AP solution part of its centralised AP processing. Read more about Time Warner Cable’s experiences setting up its SSC.

Equip yourself for future growth – Flexibility and scalability

View the free on-demand webinar below about how Shared Service Centres are achieving best in class performance.

Click here or on the image above to view the webinar.

Facilities Management – a question of sustainable cost reduction

8 Top Tips for Facilities Management

Facility Managers are all faced with one overwhelming task in the current economic climate, delivering sustainable cost savings. The problem with cutting costs is that more often than not these deliver a short term salve to current FM issues without addressing longer term issues.

So how do you deliver ‘more for less’ while still reducing operating costs?

If you fail to identify or thoroughly understand the pain points then altering or adjusting processes will provide little intrinsic long term value, so benchmarking is an invaluable starting point as it helps to provide data for effective decision making. It helps in the creation of goals and action plans, and crucially demands gathering of performance measurement data, all of which helps justify or reject practices and resultant costs.

Benchmarking really depends on having quality data which can then support strategic FM planning, and this means thoroughly understanding what is required by the organisation to successfully operate. The opening question you need to ask is what services can be benchmarked or examined in more detail to probe potential savings?

The answer varies depending on the organisation in question but there are a number of typical areas which the Facility Manager needs to understand in terms of how processes rate against other and where savings not only can be made, but need to be made.

Typical benchmarks will incorporate: utilities; costs of building operations; organisational structures; space utilization, ratios of number of workers used; outsourcing; housekeeping and security services; building and grounds maintenance; disaster recovery and strategic facilities planning; project management processes; performance-based contracting; customer satisfaction and service level agreements. It is also necessary to consider external trends in both business and FM if benchmarking is to have validity.

A benchmarking process provides data critical for questioning current processes, but to see real value from the activity requires the right questions be asked.

• As a starting point you must understand what your current processes cost and ask if there a better, more effective way in which to save costs and improve efficiency?

• How could the structure of the delivery organisation change to reduce inefficiency? Is there a quicker, more centralised way of doing things?

• What opportunities are there to reduce cost by challenging behaviours, specifications and demand?

• What supply and demand savings are achievable across all utilities services? Is there a cost effective way to automate procurement?

• What could you offer suppliers that would incentivise them to be proactive in both identifying and delivering savings? Can you be quicker and more effective?

• Would centralisation and economies of scale purchasing provide savings opportunities?

• How can process automation technologies be used to drive efficiency?

Asking the right questions in the first place is the key to successful cost savings. For further advice read the 8 top tips on how to develop FM processes and cut costs. 

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Making month end just another day

 

Getting accounts receivable (AR) right should be a point of focus of any business that wishes to retain a professional outlook and appreciative customers.  Annoyed customers being chased for payments they’ve already made, large levels of unallocated cash on account, increasing day sales outstanding DSO figures and the need for high debt value provision are all symptoms of mismanagement. However, the results of implementing an automated process for accounts receivable can be startling, and in many cases the cost of investment can be paid back within a matter of weeks.

One of the most effective means of automation is though intelligent document scanning and workflow processing. Such system automation can halve the cost of cash allocation per invoice and deliver greater levels of control than previously available. Performance indicators, such as the management cost per invoice, become instantly identifiable.

With every transaction recorded to identify the user and the action carried out, an electronic audit trail can trace a receipt to allocation or an allocation to receipt.  Every receipt generated can have a status assigned during the life cycle  enabling the user / management to identify where receipts are in the process and to log queries against them, effectively ending the need for ‘chase the payee’ notes.

Unlike the traditional manual process which is almost impossible to performance manage; an automated process constantly updates the number of receipts remaining unallocated and their status.  This provides a greater accuracy to allocation of funds. This can be further enhanced if an auto-matching process is also enabled within the document scanning and workflow process.

Automating unallocated cash through a system driven approach improves the ease of matching and the visibility of where receipts are currently allocated. In many cases, more than 98% of receipts are allocated to invoice first time.  This enables credit control personnel to focus on a very small number of queries, ensuring that these are dealt with quickly and efficiently, vastly improving the cash position of a company.

Deploying automation in to the accounts receivable processes is simple and intuitive. Training can take a matter of hours and improvements in processes and reporting can be seen as soon three weeks after implementation.

The latest generation of automated AR systems have shown in real world case studies that, even where two people undertake the existing process, up to 75% of their time can be reallocated to other, more valued added activities. Speedy Hire said, “We have achieved a resource saving equivalent to around 70% of the original team, and reduced unallocated cash by around 80%”.

Aggregate Industries which now puts 90% of the company’s order-to-cash finances through automation said, “As a business, automating has really helped the credit team concentrate on cash collection. We reduced unallocated cash by £12m in the first three months.”

To learn more about AR automation click here or download our latest whitepaper

Laying the foundations for a stronger business

In a world where speed of response is a highly prized commodity for businesses, being able to respond accurately and rapidly to prospects, customers and internal requests is a critical asset. Data is the foundation of modern business and the simple truth is that you cannot build a business when those foundations are fragmented, inaccessible or out-of-date. That is only going to lead to missed opportunities and loss of business.

As a result, enterprise content management (ECM) is on most organisations list of ‘must have’ tools.  Without content management, from an ECM platform such as Microsoft SharePoint, information is just data – unsorted, unusable and costly.

As a CIO there are searching questions to ask of a business:

• How much data is in your SharePoint sites – and how many sites do you have?
• How do your compliance officers cope with data proliferation and the risk of lost documents?
• What is the financial cost of the offsite storage and retrieval of paper documents?

If you cannot answer these questions, or the answers terrify, then you should really start to look at how automating your SharePoint environment can make a significant difference to your operations. We describe the proliferation of unstructured content as a ‘data whirlwind’ –  documents which are edited and uploaded to varied network locations; emails arriving and being sent; incoming and outgoing post; all changing all day, every day and increasing exponentially.

This is a surprisingly common situation, according to Gartner Group, “Enterprise content will grow 650% by 2014,” but here is the shocker, “80% of it remains unstructured.” Given such predictions, there is a good chance your business will be dealing with unstructured data, and if that is the case then your business is going to be more disorganised and less controlled which means there is a greater chance for non-compliant, ‘risky’ material to get caught up in the daily workflow. Consider mistakenly sending out an old, uncontrolled version of a contract to a new customer with key clauses missing, one wrong document could be the difference between profit and loss on the deal.

There is certainly no difficulty in creating the data, so much so that getting historical data in and out of your ECM has become the biggest barrier to making effective use of SharePoint. ReadSoft offers one simple, standardised solution which can capture any document and convert the data to indexed digital files will reduce labour and costs associated with managing/storing paper documents, and moves a business in a positive direction.

To learn more download our latest whitepaper here

BPO service provision best practice

 

BPO service provision can be a difficult task – yet incredibly worthwhile if it’s done correctly.  One example of a company doing it ‘just right’ and working with ReadSoft is Ratiodata IT Solution and Services, based in Germany.

Ratiodata IT Solutions & Services is a major business process outsource (BPO) service provider supplying IT and HR systems, and scan and document services to more than 370 customers. At its two digitisation centres, Ratiodata processes 100 million documents every year.

Issue
To meet a wide range of customer demands, Ratiodata required solutions from different suppliers on the market, each designed for handling individual tasks. This led to the setting up more than 1,200 different processes it was facing increasingly high development and testing costs.

Martin Greiwe, Managing Director at Ratiodata said: “We wanted a modular solution that enabled us to quickly and easily develop processes. We could then implement this as standard for all customers, so we could start new projects more quickly – without needing to closely customise each process.”

Solution
Identifying a need for a central production platform, Ratiodata chose ReadSoft XBOUND to organise all 1,200 production processes in its scanning and document services division.

ReadSoft XBOUND is a single integration platform for all input management related applications and processes,  including production scheduling and control across multiple clients, based on a standard software framework, guaranteeing highest scalability and reliability.

After digitisation, documents are handed over to the ReadSoft platform for text recognition and classification. The extracted information is then prepared for other systems to carry out production data capture, accounting, billing and Track&Trace, as well as for export to the customer. XBOUND also enables the integration of a wide range of modular functions including creating PDFs, performing OCR or processing invoices.

With its modular processes XBOUND enables Ratiodata to develop and test standard activities to be used with any customer. Entire processes can be copied, or derived from templates, and essential modules can be used in every single process. Central functions, such as document structuring, are permanently available as modules, removing the need to implement them individually for each process.

The result
This approach has resulted in significantly reduced development and testing costs for ratiodata when setting up new production lines for customers. Due to reusability and standardisation, a current project processing 50 million pages over three years has shown a saving of around 50% compared with the previous production management system.

Some documents lend themselves well to automatic processing, while others require manual checking, but with XBOUND, Ratiodata has balanced automatic and manual data, scaling to the optimal level of automation across its entire project portfolio.

Ratiodata is also able to monitor every element of production, providing process reliability and transparency for every step. As XBOUND is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) this makes it much easier to distribute work and to carry it out in multiple location simultaneously. Customer jobs are handled only once, regardless of where different parts of it are being processed.

With a fast, simple to use solution which replicates common processes, Ratiodata has been able to reduce software development and consulting costs. “This increases our competitiveness, and we can now put our services on the market for less,” says Martin Greiwe.  In addition to passing on savings to its customers, they also benefit from quicker and easier enrolment, and improved quality of service and control over their document-driven processes.

Overview:

• Production platform for over 370 clients
• One platform for scanning to archive, searchable PDF/A creation, invoice processing, mail room automation and more
• Fast and easy, autonomous implementation of new clients and processes
• Processing a mix of paper and electronic documents
• Load balancing at different locations and integration of local sites.

 

Regaining control of Accounts Receivable

Inefficiencies in the finance function can critically impact the bottom line and the viability of a business to grow and flourish. For Accounts Receivable (AR) functions, month end can be a time to dread, requiring additional staff be reallocated from other business critical functions.

A good barometer for the likelihood of bad debt provision is Day Sale Outstanding (DSO) giving the number of days it takes on average to turn a sale into cash in the bank. The problem is there are often no targets around the quality of the sales ledger, the number of queries resolved, or the reduction of costs. How robust a company’s position is will be defined by the impact of unallocated cash. Unfortunately these metrics often go unmeasured and uncontrolled.

Overall, a sales ledger should be as clean and as accurate as possible; after all it is the record of what is owed, by whom and when it is due for payment. Any unallocated cash more than seven days old is a sure sign of poor control. Unallocated cash on account occurs when goods or services have been provided and a customer has paid for them. The cash receipt has been matched to the customer’s account but not the payment. Unallocated cash on suspense/holding account is a case where goods or services have been provided and a customer has paid for them, however the cash receipt has not been matched to either the customer’s account or the invoice. In these cases the number and value of credit notes issued becomes a key indicator of poor operational delivery, a lack of quality of goods and service provided, and errors in pricing or invoicing.

So what changes can be made to the way credit with customers is managed and controlled to deliver a more effective business and better understand and control cash receipts?

First and foremost it is about understanding customer payment behaviour – particularly how and when customers pay. If a customer is paying beyond terms, what pattern emerges?  Like your own organisation, your customers will have their own behaviours. But this does not mean just letting customers pay when they want. Rather it is about making use of available metrics to better analyse and understand payment patterns and trends, and then align your systems and process with those of your customers.

Such behaviour led approach can save money through reduced credit management costs and can also improve cash received. It focuses time and effort into debtor analysis and makes credit management a scalable function rather than a fixed cost. By removing the ‘noise’ associated with unmatched credits it should be possible to bring an end to the administrative activity that detracts from the real job: to manage credit limits and collect overdue cash. So the first step is to put in place straightforward metrics that help to better understand the issues.

When the finance organisation is understood as a series of processes, it is possible to monitor the costs of each transaction. This helps to appreciate the value that each of these processes adds, and whether there is a more efficient approach.

The vast majority of these finance processes can now be simply and effectively automated, providing a stable and reliable set of metrics, regardless of the day of the month.  One of the most effective means of automation is though intelligent document scanning and workflow processing. System automation can halve the cost of cash allocation per invoice and deliver greater levels of control than previously available. Unlike the traditional manual process which is almost impossible to performance manage; an automated process constantly updates the number of receipts remaining unallocated and their status.

This helps to provide a greater accuracy to allocation of funds and in many cases, more than 98% of receipts are allocated to invoice first time. This then enables credit control personnel to focus on a very small number of queries, ensuring that these are dealt with quickly and efficiently, vastly improving the cash position of a company.

Download the whitepaper:
Accounts Recievable: Making Month End Just Another Day

ReadSoft helps UK charity engage more closely with supporters

ReadSoft, a global provider of software for back office process automation, has signed an agreement with a leading UK based charity operating in around 50 countries to provide automation of forms. ReadSoft’s technology will provide the charity with improved control, increased efficiency and reduced costs, ensuring every penny donated is spent delivering real, practical change for those in greatest need.

For this large charity organisation maintaining contact with supporters is critical. Gift Aid declarations, online donations, campaign response and supporter surveys generate tens of thousands of handwritten documents, all critical to raising funds.

ReadSoft and partner ProcessFlows have deployed the ReadSoft FORMS application to provide a smarter, more efficient and cost effective way to process documents for the charity. Initial focus has concentrated on the processing of surveys, where automation not only saves costs, but helps to reduce errors and improve data integration across the charity.

ReadSoft FORMS removes manual input of data, automatically extracting information from individual forms or batches of different types of forms at the same time – ideal for the charity’s supporter forms, Gift Aid declarations and campaign documents. The incorporation of an optical character recognition (OCR) capability, means the software can recognise and process data whether it is machine-printed or, as in this case, hand written.

The charity is now able to automate the entire process of capturing the data from a survey or response card, conducting a check of the data to ensure it is accurate before uploading it directly to its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. By automating forms capture, 20 staff have been freed up. They are now focussed on deriving greater value from data by ensuring the charity remains better engaged with active supporters as opposed to previous donors who have subsequently moved on without providing details of their new address.

Simon Shorthose, Managing Director, ReadSoft: “With so many documents both directly and indirectly relating to everything the charity does, identifying where automation could be best used to help drive down back office administration has been key. The challenge is to improve the effectiveness of the charity’s operation, and FORMS delivers. Ultimately this means more charitable donations are going to go those most in need of help, and that is a true return on investment.” ReadSoft works with many ‘not for profit’ organisations, implementing a variety of back office processes which address automation of forms as well as accounts payable and accounts receivable systems; increasing data accuracy, improving efficiencies, supporting staff and driving down costs.