As one of New Zealand’s premier learning institutions, the University of Otago puts a real focus on staying ahead of the curve in terms of its facilities and technology. With over 20,000 students and more than 4,000 staff members, ensuring its administrative systems are streamlined and efficient is paramount to keeping the University running seamlessly.

The need
For years, administration staff in the Accounts Payable team at the University of Otago had spent large portions of their day with the arduous task of manually entering all accounts payable data into their finance system.

The process of entering six fields from each of the 4,000 invoices received per week was causing strain on the university’s resources, in particular its staff. The work was “hands on” and the system was not optimised for easy recall. As with all manually keyed data the results were susceptible to human error.

Upon receiving a recommendation for Canon’s business solutions, University of Otago Financial Systems Analyst Gordon Hudson approached Canon to discuss a means of optimising the process of capturing data.

The solution
Canon’s solution included the Canon DR4010C Document Scanner which, along with Kofax Capture Software, would dramatically lessen the amount of input which required manual entry.

“On Canon’s recommendation, the University implemented the new technology and instantly started seeing tangible results. Their solution took the University from a stressful and resource-hungry data entry situation to a fully integrated system of data management, which now requires minimal data entry,” says Hudson.

Staff found the new system both quicker and easier than what they had previously experienced. The process is as simple as scanning a document, which is then read by the Kofax software through its advanced character recognition engine to search for key words such as ‘GST number’ or ‘invoice number’ and capture the corresponding value.

In around 70% of cases there will be no necessary human checking or interaction with the figures, which are automatically indexed and stored for easy searching and retrieval. Where the software is unsure of a character - for example between a fuzzy 8 or an upper case B - it will flag the instance for checking and in the majority of cases will require nothing more than a single click to verify correctness.

The result
The University of Otago is a great example of an organisation benefiting by working smarter, not harder.

Prior to consultation with Canon, staff were typing an average of 6 information fields per invoice. With 4,000 invoices being processed per week this represented 24,000 individual fields being entered.

With the installation of Canon’s solution, only 2.5% of all fields now require manual entry, with 75% being automatically read, recognised and entered into the finance system. The remaining records simply require operator verification that they have been read correctly by the software.

Previously all invoice enquiries from within the University were able to be handled only by the Accounts Payable team.

This information is now readily available to over 1,000 staff, which has allowed the Accounts Payable team to concentrate on processing invoices rather than handling queries.

Hudson is impressed not only by the reduction in inputting time that the new technology provides, but also by the ease that data can now be retrieved.

“Each time a document is scanned, an image of the document is automatically stored on the network. By searching for any one of the values or fields we’ve captured, we can easily recall the full document to the screen straight away. Because the system is fully integrated we don’t waste any time or effort searching through files to find the right one saving us both time and money. This has enabled us to remove the need for casual and temporary staff being required in our Accounts Department” says Hudson.

“And if on the off chance anything isn’t functioning 100%, Canon’s support staff can remotely connect to the system allowing us to be back up and running almost immediately,” he says.

 



> Canon New Zealand
W: www.canon.co.nz
Mike Hooker - Product Manager - Solutions
Business Imaging Solutions Group
E: mike.h@canon.co.nz
P: 09 926 9367








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