GP Optimizer Winter 2013: GP on the Case- Achieving Awesome Productivity with Case Management

Written By Marya Ulis, ImageTag, Inc.

Does your accounts payable department put the “AP” in “awesome productivity?" Your answer may depend upon how well they are able to keep up with the constant flow of documents that define your organization’s purchasing process. While Microsoft Dynamics GP provides a great platform for managing your business operations from AP to AR to human resources and more, all too often it’s the age old “paper problem” that can bring those operations to their knees. That problem is compounded by the fact that very few business transactions depend on a single piece of paper or electronic document. The majority of the time, multiple documents; multiple approval processes; and multiple internal and external stakeholders define how business gets done. Whether it’s a matter of going from procurement to payment in AP or from recruiting to interviewing to hiring in HR, the path to greater productivity demands systems and tools that can pull all the data and documents together and deliver instant transparency and access to that knowledge.

From Managing Documents to Managing Business Processes 
In today’s world, the solution to the problem of managing and tracking all the documents that support a business process is referred to as case management. Case management is distinct from document management because it focuses first on the business process you want to manage. Then, it manages your documents in the context of that process. Case management systems present data, document, and decisions in a way that portrays a clear picture of the entire process and every step along the way. As a result, your organization can eliminate bottlenecks, enforce compliance, and provide instant auditability to anyone, anywhere.

From an AP perspective, this means looking at each step in the procure-to-pay process and presenting the data, documents and decisions each step of the way. With a case management solution, your AP team can associate documents with the specific forms in GP that relate to their vendors, purchase orders, invoices, packing slips and any supporting correspondence. A case management system not only allows them to instantly associate and retrieve those documents from within GP, but it also automatically aggregates those documents to support their matching process.

What about those approvers and reviewers that don’t use Microsoft Dynamics GP? An effective case management solution should give them instant access to the data and documents they need to review, using the systems and tools that they rely on daily. That may mean providing a Web-based interface where they can review documents and add necessary data like G/L codes, or it may mean providing the ability to review data and documents on the form of an email that can be reviewed and approved by PC or smart phone.

Take the example of your payment approval process today. Let’s assume that you’ve already used your case management system to pull together scanned paper and electronic invoices that have been routed to approvers, who have digitally coded the documents and provided their approval. Your AP team has created their check batch in GP associated with those invoices. Next, rather than printing that check report or printing the individual checks to be signed, then paper clipping those documents to the printed invoices, your case management system can pull all of those documents together automatically and present them to your CFO for quick review and approval online.

A case management solution doesn’t just serve up the documents to your CFO. It presents a dashboard that clearly illustrates how each step in the payables process has been met and instills confidence in the fact that no check will be presented for review/approval unless all of the necessary criteria.

Making the Business Case for Case Management
The great thing about case management solutions is that it’s easy to quantify your return on investment (ROI)—and to demonstrate the potential to recapture your investment in as little as six months or less. Based on data collected from industry organizations like AIIM and from surveys send to thousands of KwikTag case management users, ImageTag offers an online ROI calculator. This free, online tool can help you and your organization take the first steps in outlining your potential to inject awesome productivity into accounts payable, and anywhere else in your organization where documents drive your business process. Combined with the power of Microsoft Dynamics GP, case management solutions can drive greater productivity throughout your enterprise.

Visit www.imagetag.com or go directly to http://www.imagetag.com/ap-roi  to calculate how quickly your organization can increase productivity, reduce costs and capitalize on your investment in case management.

Download The Winter 2013 Edition of The GP Optimizer Magazine: http://www.rocktonsoftware.com/gpOptimizer/Winter2013/