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Bartter Enterprises recovers its investment in electronic invoice and delivery docket management in just 12 months
At a glance
If at first you don't succeed
Decision day
Many hands, light work
New Solution
Business today
At a glance
Bartter Chickens
Industry
Poultry products
Geographies
10 distribution centres nationwide
Canon Products Used
Formscape; imageREAL; imageRUNNER MFDs
Bartter Enterprises is Australia's second largest poultry producer, employing more than 4500 people. The family owned and operated company processes in excess of 2.4 million chickens per week as well as more than 100,000 turkeys per week in peak season.
To enable the company to supply fresh produce to supermarkets, butchers, poultry shops, caterers and restaurants across the country as quickly as possible, Bartter Enterprises has 10 distribution sites nationwide, in addition to its processing facilities, head office and other places of business. This means the company is generating several thousand invoices and proof of delivery documents ("PODs") each day, everywhere from Mareeba in north Queensland to Osborne Park in Perth.
Until recently, managing 10 different mountains of paperwork was "an onerous task," says Bartter Enterprises IT Manager Steven Hepple ? not least because these documents have to be stored for seven years for taxation compliance reasons. In fact, until Bartter Enterprises spoke with Canon, it was physically storing pieces of paper in archive sheds at each of the distribution sites.
"There was essentially a person at each site whose job was to manage this paper trail," says Mr Hepple. "Plus there were a couple of people in accounts receivable who then had to chase those people on site to get the paperwork they required."
At the time, these invoices and PODs were being overprinted on preprinted stationary, sourced from a commercial printer at a cost of 9-15c per page. With the company creating thousands of invoices and PODs each day, this was another significant cost.
If at first you don't succeed
Bartter Enterprises had long been aware that significant business benefits could come from moving to a fully electronic document creation and scanning system. In fact, before the company engaged Canon Australia to build just such a solution, it had already attempted this transition, with unsatisfactory results.
According to Mr Hepple, the main problem with the first electronic document system commissioned by Bartter Enterprises was with the quality of the printing. The invoices and PODs that the previous system produced were unclear, and the optical character recognition (OCR) software at the other end of the system had trouble converting the paper back into electronic documents.
"There was a lot of manual intervention," says Mr Hepple of the old system. "The costs were prohibitive."
Bartter Enterprises abandoned its first attempt at electronic document management and temporarily reverted to managing its invoices and PODs manually.
Decision day
In time, the company's printers began to age beyond their economical life. Most of the printers in Bartter Enterprises' fleet were up to 7 years old and the company found it was spending increasing amounts on replacing printheads and other supplies and maintenance.
This created an opportunity for significant savings on the printing side of the business, which prompted Bartter Enterprises to re-examine everything from printing and scanning right through to electronic document management.
The company prepared a tender document addressing the entire document lifecycle from creation to conciliation, and approached four vendors.
"We identified what we were trying to solve and we left it up to the vendors to a large extent to put forward a solution they thought would address our problems," says Mr Hepple.
"Some of the vendors just read the paperwork and submitted a proposal, whereas Canon actually came and discussed it all with us," says Mr Hepple. "That's one of the reasons they were given the nod ? because they actually took the time to design the solution with us."
Many hands, light work
The Canon proposal integrated software and services from several sources to create a well-rounded solution specifically for Bartter Enterprises' unique business needs. The main software was Canon imageREAL plus Formscape, a third-party application that is distributed in Australia by Canon. Consulting, training and integration services were provided by both Canon and Total Printing Solutions, a local Formscape specialist.
Throughout the implementation process, Bartter Enterprises, Canon Australia and Total Printing Solutions had regular meetings to ensure the project was a success. Once the project team believed the solution was ready to test with real invoices and PODs, they went live with one of Bartter Enterprises' 10 distribution centres. The trial was a success and the company migrated the solution to its other nine distribution centres.
New Solution
Today, Formscape formats and prints invoices and PODs for Bartter Enterprises on plain A4 paper. The imageREAL document management solution automatically sorts and stores an electronic copy of every invoice and POD printed by Formscape.
Whenever drivers make deliveries, they get their customers to sign a POD, which they scan when they return to the distribution centres. Again, imageREAL automatically sorts and stores an electronic copy of each POD and uses barcodes on each document to match each of them with the originating invoice.
At any time, accounts receivable staff can then use imageREAL to quickly find invoices and PODs based on the date, the customer or almost any other criteria. Also, once a week Bartter Enterprises uses imageREAL to automatically search for any invoices without matching PODs.
The entire contents of the imageREAL database are automatically archived to a storage area network (SAN) to protect the data and comply with regulatory requirements.
Business today
While the new system requires labour to operate, Mr Hepple says it is more time efficient than filing and retrieving documents from the archive sheds, allowing Bartter Enterprises to redeploy employees to other tasks.
Productivity gains are apparent in other parts of the business, too. "Even now, with a task like sending invoices to our customers ? we can email it, whereas before it was always a matter of sticking an A3 invoice onto a photocopier, shrinking it down to A4 and then faxing it across," says Mr Hepple, by way of example.
Mr Hepple says it now costs Bartter Enterprises less than 3 cents per page to print an invoice or POD, which is a saving of more than 60% compared to the cost of overprinting these documents on preprinted stationery.
Before signing up for the Canon solution, Bartter Enterprises calculated that it would pay for itself in 12 months. With the system in place, Mr Hepple is completely confident that the system has met this demanding expectation.
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