The Director of Enterprise Solutions, Jerod Anderson of the City of Coppell, Texas, shared his organization’s successes with Laserfiche, ABBYY FlexiCapture, and their plan for the NEOGOV Laserfiche Database Integration. Coppell is a suburb of Dallas and a bedroom community in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Our Enterprise Account Manager, Alexis Blue, had the opportunity to interview Jerod about his experience working with these solutions.
Longtime fans of Laserfiche, the City of Coppell created multiples ways to harness the power of Laserfiche and empower their teams to use it to their advantage.
“Laserfiche is our enterprise content management system, we’ve been using it for years. We partnered with MCCi and all of our records are housed in Laserfiche, and we use it for all of our various departments. It is an integral part of connecting systems, and we actually use it as a middleware for multiple applications. I’m fortunate to be apart of a team of solution architects; they are responsible for various portions of it from infrastructure to forms, workflow and other business processes.”
When facing a problem or looking to innovate a business process, Laserfiche is their go-to.
When they were ready to tackle their AP process improvements, they worked with MCCi’s Professional Services team and discovered ABBYY FlexiCapture, tested it and found it was the perfect fit for their needs.
They evaluated financial software for a long time, and the weakness they identified was accounts payable. The time it took a staff member to key in the data was intense, and they wanted to eliminate that repetitive process so their people could use their brain power for more important decision making processes. Coppell’s accounts payable process was decentralized; they were looking for a way to make it easier on all end users. When it was time for testing real life invoices, it impressed their team right out of the box! They gave the ABBYY solution a dozen random invoices, and FlexiCapture digested each of them, and cranked the data out at 99 percent accuracy! The fact that it captured the correct metadata needed to process their AP impressed Jerod and his team the most.
Now, their AP is centralized, the invoices route to various departments, the admins dump their invoices into a dedicated accounts payable folder, and FlexiCapture trolls that folder, grabs the invoices and captures the metadata. It uses Machine Learning (ML) so the next time an invoice from that vendor comes through, it can process it with even more accuracy.
But they’ve even taken it a step further by integrating this new process into their financial module. They leverage an API to push it directly into their financial system where they can continue the approval process for the AP. By the time it reaches their financial module, FlexiCapture completed a three-way match, validated the information, the P.O, the vendor number and all the things that are required by Coppell’s accounts payable process. Finally, the AP clerk processes the AP.
Automation Benefits
- Automated a two-step process that previously required 19+ hours to complete.
- Reduced invoice consolidation process from 14-16 hours to 1-2 minutes per month.
- Reduced Salesforce entry from 2-3 hours to 1-2 minutes per month
- Reduced errors to zero.
- Identified processes for partial and full automation opportunities.
What’s next for the City of Coppell? They are working on the human resource side and procured the NEOGOV Laserfiche Integration, developed by MCCi. It will help their team create and securely store employee records. “We’re really excited about that development!”
