Wigan Council is looking forward to making savings totalling £250,000 after automating its purchase invoice process.
The council was struggling to pay suppliers within 30 days and needed to automate the process to meet e-government targets. It struck a deal with Graphic Data Online (GDO) to scan past and present invoices and capture the data alongside the scanned image. The data is now fed into the council's Comino document management solution weekly. Invoices are matched with purchase orders and, once approved, are posted to an Agresso Financial system.
Ian Kell, deputy director of finance and IT at Wigan Council, says the bureau solution suits the council which plans to move to a paperless model in the longer term: "We could have used an invoice imaging system only - facilities were available within Agresso and Comino. But we did not want to build up in-house scanning capability with the knowledge that longer term we would be running it down. We agreed it would be better to utilise scanning bureau expertise and hold to performance targets and turnaround."
Kell added: "Once we started talking to GDO, the potential advantages of using software to grab the data as well as the image became better understood and opened up the prospect of matching off and automating a larger part of the payment process than we had otherwise anticipated."
The council plans to develop its ERP system by developing a project, costing and billing module, embracing job costing (for example for highways and transport), capital programme and asset management applications.
Autor: Tracey Caldwell
Quelle: IT Week, 16.05.2005
