Many companies have turned to imaging and workflow solutions like AP automation to reduce paper and storage costs, improve customer service with rapid access to documents, and to streamline and automate business processes. To highlight the benefits of utilizing imaging and workflow solutions to improve your organization’s accounts payable (AP) process, Hyland Software – developer of OnBase® – is pleased to present you with a white paper from PayStream Advisors, a research and advisory firm, entitled, Efficiency & Cost Management in Accounts Payable: OnBase Imaging & Workflow Automation Solutions.
PayStream Advisors’ latest research indicates that businesses are turning to Imaging and Workflow Automation (IWA) solutions that streamline the invoice receipt-to-pay cycle to meet these new requirements for efficiency and control. Consider the results of the 2004 Financial Automation Survey of Fortune 1000 finance, treasury, and accounting professionals:
- 40.0 percent and 27.4 percent of respondents said that workflow tools and imaging and document management solutions respectively will be critical to their payables automation strategies for the next 18 months;
- 30.1 percent and 27.4 percent of respondents said that they plan to deploy an imaging and document management or workflow solution respectively during the coming year.
This report is written for the 25 to 30 percent of survey respondents who are actively exploring IWA solutions. Beginning with an introduction to IWA, it describes the most common forms that solutions take and highlights the benefits that they deliver.
It concludes with an in-depth profile of one of the top vendors in this space – Hyland Software – describing in detail Hyland Software’s OnBase enterprise content management (ECM) software suite and its approach to IWA.
As businesses have shifted their emphasis from growth to cost containment and productivity enhancement, AP departments have come under renewed scrutiny for their reliance on costly and inefficient paper-based processes. At the same time, Sarbanes-Oxley has increased senior managers’ focus on AP by drawing their attention to the compliance risks inherent to manual, paper-based processes.
