Heiton Group traditionally generates a very large volume of transactions with a large number of suppliers, for a large number of products. This had been mainly a manual process, but the company will soon take advantage of an electronic archive.
The Irish industrial group, which has core businesses operating in builders merchanting including plant and tool hire; steel stockholding and homecare/DIY, is in the final stages of rolling out SoftCo Enterprise for its accounts payable (AP) and receivable (AR) departments.
SoftCo has provided the Heiton Group with the SoftCo AP and AR Web-based document management system that will work with the group’s existing ERP system to automate the capture, storage, retrieval and routing of finance-related documents.
Using SoftCo Enterprise, authorised Heitons personnel can search and retrieve invoices and associated documents locally or remotely via a Web browser. Heitons has 22 locations nationwide and it employs credit controllers at all of those branches: They have access to this document database which they have not had to date. Now, through the use of a browser, no desktop software needs to be installed.
The document routing module in Softco Enterprise monitors the status of a given query and the company expects it will speed up the resolution of payables and receivables queries. When invoices come in for payment, they are sent to head office. If the invoice matches the purchase order then the invoice is paid. If the invoice does not match the internal purchase order number we have raised, the accounts payable people in head office may need further assistance from branch staff.
Using SoftCo Enterprise, a manager in any branch or at head office can look up all Irish Cement invoices of the month of March in the Gorey branch. The document management system will allow those queries, for example, the branch manager may say the price is correct because a certain product was on special offer for that month,
‘The benefits we see from the system are better interaction with our suppliers—accounts payable—and better interaction with our customers—accounts receivable,’ says Andrew Hewat, project manager with Heitons. ‘We are improving the way we do business with our customers.’
Another advantage is that Heitons can use the same hardware and software for both AP and AR elements. ‘That was very attractive to us because we would have considered those two elements as separate entities,’ Hewat explains. ‘To roll the two together increases the overall benefits.’
Both are in the final stage of installation and are currently running on a server at Heitons head office. ‘This is very much an off-the-shelf product in broad terms,’ Hewat stresses. ‘There was a bit of consultation for integration and project rollout but it really has been a benefit to us that customisation has been kept to a minimum. From a project management point of view, it has been relatively stress-free.’
On the AR side, Heitons has a large number of account holders and operates credit accounts for trade customers. With the new system, the company can now make purchase order forms available electronically across all of its branches.
‘How efficiently we can produce copies is a potential area for impact on debtor days,’ Hewat points out. Purchase orders are scanned into the system, so that when a customer contacts Heitons with a query on his statement or invoice, credit controllers will have immediate access to the documents. Copies of these can be printed, faxed or e-mailed if necessary.
Hewat makes the distinction that the system’s Web features doesn’t necessarily mean Heitons staff are viewing the data over the Internet, just that a browser interface is used to interrogate the data. However because the system is written this way, it means that making the data available to external customers ‘would be logical at a point in the future’, says Hewat.
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