Success story
Palm Beach County School Board
Industry• EducationSolution• OpenText™ Capture Center

Partner Support• Informa Software

Florida school district streamlines
invoice processing with document
capture solution
Palm Beach County School Board makes the grade with
OpenText Capture Center

Results
Reduced paper storage costs
and faster invoice processing
Automated processes reduce
headcount requirements
Increased visibility andaccountability for invoice process“With OpenText Capture Center, we’re processing
more invoices per day with half the number ofstaff than when we were doing it manually.”
Ken Kohler

PeopleSoft Functional Specialist
Palm Beach County School Board

Florida school district streamlines invoice processing with document capture solution

The School District of Palm Beach County is the 11th largest in the U.S.
and the 5th largest in the state of Florida with 185 schools, serving
more than 183,000 students. As the largest employer in Palm BeachCounty, the school district has more than 21,000 employees, including
more than 12,000 teachers.

BackgroundAs one of the top-performing school districts in Florida, Palm BeachCounty is committed to providing a world-class education to itsstudents. But with recent economic challenges, the school district has
faced significant budget reductions. In order to direct as much of its
limited financial resources to student education as possible, the schoolboard is focused on maximizing efficiencies and savings. Heather Knust,director of Accounting Services at Palm Beach County School Board,
oversees the financial operations of the school district. With partner
Informa Software, Knust recently deployed OpenText Capture Center
to optimize the school board’s accounts payable processes.
TMChallenge

Costly manual and paper-intensive processes

The school board’s accounts payable (AP) department processes anestimated 175,000 invoices annually for all the schools and departments
within the Palm Beach County school district. But the processing ofinvoices was very manual and labor-intensive. In order to reduce costs
and improve productivity, Knust wanted to automate these repetitive,
manual and paper-based processes, but she needed a solution thatwould integrate with the Oracle® PeopleSoft system that the AP department was using.

Cumbersome record-keeping requirements
In addition, as a government entity, Palm Beach County School Board
has to follow certain mandates when it comes to maintaining records,
resulting in high costs for storage of paper invoices and additional
manual processes. Knust wanted to eliminate those storage costs andautomate those processes. “We have to pay for offsite storage for allof our invoices, except the current and the previous fiscal year. Wheninvoices are requested for audits or public records requests, we haveto order some of the boxes from storage, which takes two-to-fivedays to arrive. We then have to find the invoice, remove the staples,
photocopy it and then file it. It is an extremely manual process andinvoices can easily be misplaced,” she said.

Solution

A trusted partnership
In searching for a solution that would help automate invoice processing,
Knust considered the partnership the school district already had with
Informa Software, a Florida-based company specializing in process
automation, document management, email management and document
distribution software solutions. Palm Beach County District School
Board had previously worked with Informa to automate time, expense
and travel reimbursement forms.
Advanced document capture solution
In collaboration with Informa, the school board determined that Capture
Center was the solution of choice. Capture Center uses advanced tools
to capture, classify, extract information from, validate and store paper
documents and other types of content. The solution applies document
recognition functionality first to classify the document type and thenextract business data from the digital image using Optical Character“We plan to fully utilize theautomation capabilitiesof the system later in theyear by letting invoices
go through with little orno human intervention.”
Heather Knust

Director of Accounting Services
Palm Beach County School BoardFlorida school district streamlines invoice processing with document capture solution

Recognition (OCR), Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) and Intelligent
Document Recognition (IDR). Knust shared her rationale: “We knewthat Informa would be a good partner and that they would be able towork with the OpenText Capture Center solution. If we were to go withanother solution, it would have been plain, out-of-the-box and I wouldn’t
have had all the additional functionality that I was looking for.”

Implementation

In August 2014, the school board deployed the Capture Center solution,
starting with the scanning of invoices, which allows Palm Beach County
School Board to automatically capture and interpret paper invoices,scanned images, email and faxes. The solution features a customized
workflow, created by Informa, to route invoices through Capture Center
to the PeopleSoft ERP system. “That was part of the value-add service
that we provided. We crafted a middle layer so that, from Capture
Center, we could communicate directly with PeopleSoft,” said Mike
James, president, Informa Software.
Since this automation is a significant change from previous AP processes,
Knust took a measured approach to rolling it out. Once each automatedfunction was working well, they released it. “We spent additional timeup front to learn the capabilities of the software. As we use it, we areable to fine-tune it to meet our unique needs with the help of Informa.
We plan to fully utilize the automation capabilities of the system
later in the year by letting invoices go through with little or no humanintervention,” she said.

As part of the automation process, the school board is now encouraging
vendors to email invoices instead of sending them paper invoices that
require scanning. “One of the things we’ve set up are email portals
so that Palm Beach County School Board can encourage theirvendors to email them the invoices. Then we pick them up directlyfrom within Capture Center and process them that way,” said James.
“We’ve gotten a number of vendors to the point where ultimately,
once they get the go-ahead, all those invoices can be processed
totally electronically—they are automatically fed from Capture
Center into PeopleSoft and out comes a paper check, without any
individual work required.”
Accepting invoices via email eliminates the need to manually open mailand sort all the invoices. Capture Center offers rule-based classification, extraction and verification tools. “We don’t have to sort invoices
out anymore because we’ve automated that as well,” said Knust. “Withcertain vendors like Office Depot, where we’re getting hundreds ofinvoices a week, we’re going to be able to automate that process towhere an AP person isn’t even going to have to look at them.”
Bob Rucinski, AP manager at Palm Beach County School Board, agreed.
“We’re very close to having invoices flow through our system fromthe email mailbox all the way to the paper check, without any humanintervention,” he said. Though not in the immediate scope of thiscost-savings initiative, the team looks forward to one day eliminating thepaper checks as well.

“We’ve gotten a numberof vendors to the point
where ultimately, once
they get the go-ahead,
all those invoices canbe processed totallyelectronically.”
Mike JamesPresident
Informa Software

Florida school district streamlines invoice processing with document capture solution

Benefits

Improved productivity and reduced resources
Though not yet fully deployed, Capture Center’s reduced manual processing and paper handling has already resulted in significant gains.
Before starting the scanning process, an invoice was touched at least
five times before it reached the check printing stage. Rucinski states:“We’ve eliminated at least four of those processes with the Capture
Center scanning project.” Invoice management has been accelerated
by using a digital workflow right from the start. “With OpenText Capture
Center, we’re processing more invoices per day with half the number ofstaff than when we were doing it manually,” said Ken Kohler, PeopleSoft
functional specialist.
In addition, with fewer invoices coming through the mail, there’s beena reduction in staff time spent handling and sorting paper. “I had aposition before where the sole function was to take a copy of thecheck and match it up with the paper invoice and then file it. That
position has been eliminated with this process, because there isnothing to match up or file anymore,” said Knust. In fact, Knust will
be able to reduce the AP technical staff. “As a result of implementing
this project I was able to eliminate three AP techs through attrition,bringing the department down to six. When I started eight years ago,
we had 16.”
Enhanced visibility and tracking
The automation of invoice handling has also resulted in complete visibility
into the status of invoices. “Paper invoices might sit on someone’s desk
for a period of time,” said Rucinski. “We had no visibility into where
those invoices were or how old they were. Now they are scanned automatically on the day they arrive. From the time it’s scanned to thetime it’s paid, we know where it is.” By keeping track of documents, theteam reduces compliance risks, facilitates auditing and improves vendor
relations with more timely payments and fewer lost invoices that have tobe reissued.
Paper storage cost reductions and efficiencies
With Capture Center, the team has also been able to automate theprocess related to records retention and save money on paper storage.
“We no longer physically store any paper invoices. They are storedand filed electronically, eliminating the possibility of misfiling a paper
invoice. Then based on the type of invoice it is, whether operationalor capital expenditure, we apply different record retention periods
systematically,” said Knust.
Storing invoices by check number was very cumbersome. “The retention period differs based on funding. When we stored invoices in abox sequentially by check number, there was no way to decipher thefund number and it meant that we had to keep all of the invoices. But
now with the new electronic storage process, the funding is linked
back to the invoice. Record retention guidelines are mapped basedon the fund and the document image will be automatically disposedof based on the established guidelines,” said Knust.
Satisfaction guaranteed
While efficiencies and savings have been the driving factors, staff satisfaction has been a side benefit of this initiative. “When we started
working on this project, the AP staff were very reluctant to move toa new way of doing things. But recently, having been live for a coupleof months, we had a memory issue on our server and, for one day, wehad to go back to the old way of doing things. The staff complained
vigorously about how laborious it was the old way,” said Rucinski.

“We no longer physicallystore any paper invoices.
They are stored and filed
electronically, eliminating
the possibility of misfilinga paper invoice.”
Heather Knust

Director of Accounting Services
Palm Beach County School Board

Florida school district streamlines invoice processing with document capture solution

FutureLooking ahead, Knust and her team anticipate graduating to the next
phase of the solution, which is to tackle invoices for food services,utilities and construction. The process for these invoices is slightly
different, requiring some additional customization.
The future looks even more promising as Knust strives to achieve evengreater efficiencies and savings for Palm Beach County School Board.
Knust said of her ultimate plan: “My goal is to maximize productivity
utilizing state of the art technology to achieve my vision of a paperless AP department.”

About Informa

Since 2001 Informa Software has provided business productivity
solutions including content management, RightFax, LANFax, document
imaging, data capture and business process automation. Informa
focuses on three main business solution offerings�software productdevelopment, partner solution integration (OpenText, Microsoft, HP,DocuSign) and systems application consulting. Informa offers thetools, personnel and business expertise to allow companies to reduce
operating costs, manage risk and maximize productivity. Their subject
matter expertise as well as business process design experience allows
them to help their customers quickly get to the root of their problems
and implement timely and cost effective solutions. As a premier technology solution partner, Informa provides a single source for technology
products, services, integration, configuration, deployment, installationand infrastructure support.
informasoftware.com

About OpenText

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through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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