Paperless Billing: Bravo Forms Saved IPTCI Time and Money
IPTCI is a Minnesota-based wholesale distributor of mounted bearings serving several industries founded in 1963. The company has succeeded in its stated goal to exceed the expectations of their customers. With their success, however, came growing pains.
Objective
In the last 10 years, IPTCI’s processed transactions increased sixfold while the number of employees remained the same. Director of IT Roger Olson knew that something had to give, so he applied IPTCI’s aptitude for innovation toward finding tools that allow IPTCI to scale operations without ballooning staff.
Why Pay for Paper and Postage?
IPTCI was sending out hundreds of invoices every day. Their costs for paper and envelopes alone was 19 cents per transaction — plus postage. Each transaction was costing the company 58 cents. Rather than writing off their paper and postage expenses as the cost of doing a brisk business, they wanted a more efficient way to send invoices.
IPTCI knew there had to be a better way, but wanted to make sure their customers would venture along with them into the great paperless beyond. IPTCI’s proactive market research convinced them that most customers were ready and willing to transition from mailed paper invoices to faxed or emailed electronic documents.
Cutting Costs and Clutter
Armed with that knowledge, IPTCI began searching for a technology solution that would not only enable the electronic distribution of their invoices, but also help the company achieve their goal of building a paperless archiving system for invoicing paperwork and other documents.
Additionally, IPTCI was tying up highly-skilled administrative workers tasked with processing all this paperwork, taking up an average of two hours of staff time per day managing invoices and insuring that each account received the correct number of copies, etc. What had been a manageable paper process just years prior had become an unacceptable drain on time and resources.
Solutions
Picking and Choosing Bravo Forms
IPTCI runs its business using a custom ERP system custom-built in Pick BASIC, and their staff is well familiar and comfortable with the green-screen interfaces they’ve been using for many years. Because the Pick system primarily uses character-based printing technology, other document-workflow products on the market did not offer the convenience of Bravo Forms, which is built around character-based printing workflows.
Using the advanced XML prolog features of Bravo Forms, IPTCI modified their invoice printing procedures to include indicators of each client’s distribution preferences. IPTCI successfully transitioned all but a handful of their clients to electronically-delivered invoicing (either fax or email), effectively eliminating the fixed costs associated with each transaction.
Paper Lays Waste to Profits and Trees Alike
With Bravo Forms, any printer and any paper will do, giving IPTCI an enduring ability to satisfy customers still wanting paper invoices delivered by the U.S. mail. They can even send copies of an invoice to multiple contacts within an organization upon request.
IPTCI was also able to take advantage of the built-in archiving capabilities of Bravo Forms to automatically create an electronic archive of each invoice, eliminating the need for paper archives and enabling a much more backup-friendly, space-saving filing system.
Results
IPTCI was able to repurpose time that had been spent on fulfilling invoices to staff a new procedure that paired scanned documents (including checks and picking tickets) with the correct invoice within the Bravo Forms archives. With the Bravo Forms system — coupled with some clever programming in their ERP system — employees can now pull up the matching PDF documents in Acrobat directly from the relevant screens within the character-based system.
“Bravo Forms dramatically reduced IPTCI’s paper, postage, storage and administrative costs,” said Roger Olson. “Rather than storing boxes upon boxes of hard-to-retrieve documents for seven years, we can keep paperless files indefinitely — all of them readily available for review with just a click of the mouse. We are no longer bogged down by administrative tasks related to invoicing, with more time to focus on our business.”
IPTCI signed on as one of the launch beta-testers with Bravo Forms in the late summer of 2006 and were up and running with Bravo Forms by October. ITPCI estimates that their total time to ROI was less than nine months based on the fixed mailing costs alone, but they’ve also recognized improvements in customer satisfaction, reduced customer service workloads, and an average of 10 man-hours per week of labor savings.
Bravo Forms provides an adaptable platform for IPTCI to continue to develop new workflow techniques. They plan to some day implement barcode-reading technology into their scanning software to further reduce the administrative overhead involved with their paperless initiatives.