Here’s a little Christmas secret: every business in the world needs AP automation. When you have a company that’s delivering millions of gifts around the globe in an effort to spread worldwide joy, you simply cannot fail on that promise. And to reach your goal and deliver all those presents, you need to be organized.
The Saint Nick Factory Inc. has been manufacturing and distributing personalized toys and gifts across all five continents for close to 3 centuries now. The company relies on thousands and thousands of suppliers for the various materials used to manufacture its famous products.
“We are likely the largest consumer of raw materials in the world,” says Mr. Nicholas Kringle, CEO of The Saint Nick Factory Inc. And such a high volume of transactions means a large stack of supplier invoices. So how did Mr. Nicholas Kringle manage to deal with all those invoices?
He made a bold decision. The Saint Nick Factory had been working its accounts payable manually for the past 3 centuries, but no more. There just weren’t any more hands he could recruit, no more toy workers he could sacrifice to help keep track of all that paperwork. Mr. Nicholas Kringle decided it was time to try another method to keep track of those invoices. Get the scoop on how AP automation saved The Saint Nick Factory Inc…. and Christmas!
The Introduction of AP Automation at The Saint Nick Factory Inc.
In the beginning, the invoices were easy to handle. But the more customers the company obtained every year, so did the number of suppliers, and because of that more hands, we needed in the AP department. Managing the growing number of invoices became very difficult. It wasn’t uncommon to lose an invoice back in those days. The AP department was simply a big stack of papers. Mr. Nicholas Kringle had to admit, he felt bad for his staff. “After all, accounts payable personnel had to spend a lot of time running around trying to trace those lost documents. And once they had processed all the invoices, they had to archive them in a humongous filing office. There just wasn’t time anymore for all these procedures, and the staff was exhausted by the draining exercise. Moreover, it just couldn’t produce the results we had when we first started our business”. It was time to turn to Robotic Process Automation.
“Processing those paper invoices was extremely time-consuming, and we saw plenty of data-entry errors from AP clerks manually entering invoice information into our system,” said Alfred Kralik, VP of Finance at Saint Nick Factory Inc.
Fortunately for the Saint Nick Factory, Mr. Kringle attended a tradeshow a few summers ago, at which he met the executive of an interesting company exhibiting at that tradeshow. “I distinctively remember my conversation with Marc Voyer, the Chief Commercial Officer at INTEGRIM,” said Nicholas Kringle. “He started telling me about how document automation could help us process our vendor invoices more efficiently and how we could get rid of all that paper.”
Marc was invited by Mr. Kringle to go and visit the Saint Nick Factory in person so that he could look at their current process and assess if INTEGRIM could help their AP department. After seeing those poor AP clerks running left and right and being overworked, Marc presented a project plan to the Saint Nick Factory management team. They were so impressed by what Marc presented that they unanimously voted to go ahead with the AP automation project.
“In addition to the AP automation module, we also went on board with their Expense Account Automation solution,” said Jack Frost, Controller at The Saint Nick Factory. “We have thousands of employees who travel around the world in order to make sure that our customers deserve to receive our products. That means that they incur expenses for which they need to be reimbursed. With the INTEGRIM solution, they can now use their smartphones to capture their receipts. No more paper receipts in wallets or purses!!!”
The Improvements Made Thanks to INTEGRIM’s AP Automation System
Since the implementation of INTEGRIM’s AP automation system, there have been tremendous improvements. “With the help of INTEGRIM we are now able to:
- Process 85% of our vendor invoices without requiring any human intervention;
- Our AP staff can now focus on the remaining 15% that really need their attention;
- We get to put more workers back to the toy factory which means more happy customers this season.
Christmas season will never have been so easy to handle. All we have to do is let the AP automation system run because we know we can trust it!” said Alfred Kralik.
Implementing INTEGRIM has also provided a direct benefit to all of Saint Nick Factory’s employees. “Since INTEGRIM’s AP automation solution provides electronic archiving, we eliminated the need to file paper invoices and expense reports,” added Nicholas Kringle. “We were able to remove all the filing cabinets from our filing office, and we used that space to make an entertainment area for our employees. They can now enjoy an Olympic swimming pool, 3 movie theaters, 15 bowling alleys, a hockey rink, 12 tennis courts, and 50 ping pong tables. And since over 50% of that old filing office is still unused, we are looking at adding an indoor water park next year. We want to make sure we keep our employees happy. After all, happiness is really what our company is all about.”
Nicholas Kringle even reported that this year’s factory productivity has notably increased, thanks to the implementation of the AP automation system. The accounts payable automation also made it much easier to share information with suppliers. As an extra bonus, without anyone subjected to an error-prone process, employees have never been happier to work at The Saint Nick’s Factory! The AP Automation system’s leading-edge semi-structured
If you want to put your papers in order and implement an AP Automation system just like Nicholas Kringle, contact us today. An experienced member of our team will gladly tell you everything there is to know about SenSaaS! and answer all of your questions.
