Industry: Service Provider
Location: USA
Application: Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable, Personnel Files
Document Types: Invoices, Sales Receipts, other AP/AR documents, personnel files
Hospitality company serves up 5-star employee experience, offering easier accounting workflow processes to remote employees, facilitated by cloud office automation software
Hospitality management company, Culinaire, implemented DocuWare Cloud to streamline accounting documents from 30 remote sites. Today, documents are scanned, automatically indexed and uploaded, providing the corporate accounting office with real-time access to information and reducing document processing costs dramatically. Personnel files are also stored in DocuWare for secure long-term retention.
Content
Culinaire International
Culinaire International partners with hotels, venues and restaurants to manage food service and catering operations. Culinaire manages the day-to-day operations of the food service side of a business, such as a restaurant inside a hotel or cafe at a museum. They also provide management assistance as needed by their clients. Headquartered in Texas, Culinaire operates in 17 states and employs 1,800-2,000 people.
Requirements
The Tasks
- Eradicate paper-based processes and information bottlenecks associated with mailing information from 17 remote offices to the corporate headquarters
- Automate the accounting workflow, streamline the approval process and simplify accounting processes for employees at remote locations
- Improve efficiency and gain the ability to electronically search for information
Culinaire’s central accounting office had to manage large volumes of paper documents. Each remote location sent weekly FedEx package with copies of accounts receivable and accounts payable documents. The company recognized their workflow was inefficient and began looking for ways to reduce their paper flow. After evaluating outsourcing accounting options and basic digital document repositories, Culinaire realized that they needed a more robust solution that had search functionality, optical character recognition (OCR), digital workflow, and the ability to automate indexing and eliminate paper files.
Solution
Applied Modules
Culinaire choose to implement DocuWare Cloud because of its functionality, flexibility, ease-of-use and affordability.
“We chose to implement DocuWare Cloud to avoid taxing our internal IT staff and be able to quickly deploy the solution to the corporate office as well as 30 remote locations. Implementing a cloud system was the quickest way to get something in place and have it be as seamless and easy to use as possible,” said Emilia O’Brien, Accounting Manager, Culinaire International.
O’Brien traveled to each location to set up a pre-programmed Scanmate i1150 Kodak scanner and train employees. Remote employees log into Culinaire’s accounting portal daily, input all the sales from each day, and then print a report. The report is used as a cover page for a batch of “back-up” documents that are then scanned using a pre-programmed scan option that corresponds to an import job for each document type. The scan job is saved to a local folder and the remote employee can move on to other tasks. A desktop app works in the background to monitor the folder and upload and import the documents into the AR cabinet with all the fields already indexed. The corporate office reviews the information and posts it to the accounting system.
Benefits
The Benefits
- Gave the corporate accounting staff the tools they need to do their job well
- Eliminated courier costs and improved workflow
- Improved information visibility
Limited data entry, automated indexing and uploading have streamlined the flow of information, speeding up the accounting process. Today, FedEx packages and fees are a thing of the past. The visibility of information changed dramatically for the accounting office - instead of waiting one week, sales documents can now be viewed that same day. Digital transparency helps the accounting staff get documents through the approval and closing processes, avoiding information bottlenecks. DocuWare helped Culinaire reduce its costs, achieving a faster Return on Investment.
“Our field people are Operation Managers dealing with kitchens, clients and keeping a restaurant in sync. DocuWare alleviated my concern of putting an added burden on these managers. This solution makes scanning fast and easy and helped our employees embrace the new process,” said O’Brien.
Conclusion
Seeing the benefits in their accounting department motivated other teams and DocuWare is now being used by the Human Resources department. The company is finetuning this application and rolled out an on-boarding process using DocuWare Forms with the goal with of simplifying the process for new hires and current staff. The company file room now has only empty cabinets and can be repurposed into offices or another flexible space.
“Our CFO loves DocuWare and has been instrumental in getting other managers and employees to embrace DocuWare. Cost savings and increased visibility are the main reasons we are so excited about this solution,” said O’Brien.
“We chose to implement DocuWare Cloud to avoid taxing our internal IT staff and be able to quickly deploy and implement the solution to the corporate office as well as 30 remote locations. Implementing a cloud system was the quickest way to get something in place and have it be as seamless and easy to use as possible.”
Emilia O’Brien, Accounting Manager, Culinaire International
