Alegri International Supercharges Efficiency with Digitized Human Resources and Accounts Payable Processes

Alegri International ‘Walks the Talk’ by Implementing Kofax to Automate Capture-Driven Processes and Enhance Its Own Internal Efficiencies

Top Microsoft SharePoint Partner is both Kofax reseller and end-user customer

As an end-user of Kofax solutions, Alegri International became a reseller so it could share the Kofax benefits with its own clients. Besides adding the Kofax platform to its solution portfolio, this IT consulting company in Germany uses Kofax Capture™ and Kofax Transformation Modules™ to distribute salary statements in HR and process 10,000 invoices annually.

In 2011, Alegri sought to improve its operational efficiency by automating two key areas: Human Resources/Salary Information and Accounts Payable/Invoice Processing.

Human Resources/Salary Information

In Germany, companies are required to provide monthly salary statements that detail earnings, health insurance deductions, taxes, unemployment insurance payments, direct deposits, etc., to each employee. Standard practice for Alegri Human Resources had been to send confidential paper statements through the company’s internal post mail. This posed a couple of challenges. First, processing 600 manual pay slips monthly became very time-intensive for the HR department. Second, many of the Professional Services employees rarely visit the office because they are at customer sites, so it was difficult for them to access their salary information. Growth-minded Alegri sought to automate and digitize this salary statement process not only to relieve the burden on HR and minimize information latency, but also to ensure a significantly more efficient process is in place as the company continues to grow.

“As a high tech company, we want to automate processes where we can to be as lean as possible for growth. We were looking for a solution to deploy salary information faster while still complying with strict German privacy laws,” said Guido Klein, Senior Consultant, IT Department and Infrastructure for Alegri International.

Accounts Payable/Invoice Processing

In the Accounts Payable (AP) department, “The whole subject of billings was on paper,” Klein remarked. Employees were sending billing and invoices via postal service to the headquarters in Munich where the documents were manually processed by the Accounting department. Approvals were made via email or telephone. Because the work flow was content-dependent, the manual process for 10,000 document pages per year was even more cumbersome and time-intensive.

“We wanted to completely digitize invoice processing end-to-end,” said Klein. “Our goal was to have the employee hit a button where the invoice would be scanned and distributed properly, appropriate workflow would be triggered, and ultimately, payment would be made automatically on approved invoices.”

When the Alegri IT team set out to solve both these business challenges, Klein said, “We didn’t look at competitors. We went straight away to Kofax because they are the clear leader in the capture market. Our team knew we’d do it with Kofax or not at all.”

According to Klein, “We already had the Kofax platform operating effectively in the enterprise – they had a good reputation and we had a good relationship with them. It was now a matter of talking to Kofax about how we could add modules to make Capture work for these two applications as well. Kofax confirmed what we wanted was possible with Kofax Transformation Modules (KTM) and began driving the project tremendously to bring our vision to life.”

Both solutions were successfully implemented in less than 30 days. And with just a few days of training, in-house employees were fully operational with no external assistance required from Kofax.

Today, both applications are fully automated and digitized, positioning Alegri for continued growth and serving as a highly successful real-world case from which Alegri customers can also benefit.

Human Resources/Salary Information

With Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation Modules, Alegri employees now have anytime access to their confidential salary statements via a portal in SharePoint. Inside SharePoint, an email is automatically sent to the employee when his/ her record has been updated. Employee acceptance of this automated capture-driven process is very high. In fact, employees have even requested synchronization with their mobile phones.

“Salary statement distribution, which formerly took two full days each month, now takes just 10 minutes per month” stated Klein. “In the beginning, there was some skepticism about change which is normal, but HR was quickly delighted by how easy the system is to use.”

Accounts Payable/Invoice Processing

Despite archiving 10,000 pages of invoice-related documents processed each year, filing space is no longer an issue for Alegri Accounts Payable. The capture-driven process automation has made the process easy, electronic and space-saving. Paper invoices have been eliminated. Further simplifying the process, each location has the right to approve its own invoices and tracing is now possible, a benefit to both Alegri and its vendor partners. Also, human resources that once were dedicated to manual invoice processing have been reallocated to higher priority activities.

“This was not a complex solution to put in place, but its impact has been extremely positive and the ROI quite clear,” Klein shared. “Invoice processing time has been slashed from 1-3 days to 3-5 minutes. Many companies can benefit from this solution.”