Accounts Payable automation for an International Hotel Chain
Hyatt International
Hyatt International, a renowned chain of luxury hotels, needed a scanning and document management solution to support the accounts payable process for their nine Australian hotels.
The Challenge
Hyatt International's nine hotels rely heavily on outside suppliers for everything from bars of soap to dry cleaning, fresh flowers to window washing, and massive blocks of ice for ornamental sculpting.
Each supplier must be paid individually. Every month, Hyatt receives over 15,000 invoices, comprising almost 45,000 pieces of paper. In the past, Accounts Payable staff would manually sort, key in data from, and file invoices couriered daily from Hyatt hotels to the Hyatt Services Australia (HSA) shared services unit in Melbourne.
Invoices from so many different suppliers come in many shapes, sizes, and fonts -- making them impossible to process with systems that are built around high-volume scanners and conventional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. HSA evaluated several automation alternatives, and selected Stellar's fileWise solution.
The Solution
Whereas hotels used to physically ship invoices to HSA for processing, hotel clerks now process the documents on site.
Each invoice is labelled with a barcode generated from purchase order information in Hyatt's Scala enterprise resource planning system. Invoices are then fed into a high-volume scanner that collates the document images into a single .TIF file.
Every night, the fileWise server at HSA in Melbourne downloads the .TIF files from each hotel, then separates them according to the barcodes and queues them for reconciliation by HSA's Accounts Payable clerks in the morning.
Those clerks used to spend hours each day sorting, keying in information from, and filing the invoices by hand. Now, fileWise displays document images onscreen alongside details of approved purchase orders extracted directly from Scala. This lets clerks instantly confirm invoice accuracy and identify any variations (for example, if a supplier substituted a different type of cleaning agent because it ran out of the usual brand).
Variations require the creation of a Purchase Request that must be approved by relevant Hyatt managers. With the help of Stellar, HSA developed a Lotus Notes agent that links fileWise with Hyatt's Notes environment. When a clerk needs to forward a queried invoice, or change or create a Purchase Order to accommodate the discrepancies, fileWise automatically queries Notes' user database and routes the request to the appropriate supervisor.
Using the fileWise Purchase Order/Purchase Request module, fileWise tracks every step of the approval process as Purchase Requests are escalated into complete Purchase Orders. Detailed workflow management ensures that changes to Hyatt Purchase Orders are logged, immediately presented for approval, and archived to ensure integrity and auditability in the future.
Analysing the hotels' workflow during implementation helped HSA optimize all of its existing processes, as well as paving the way for expanded usage of fileWise.
HSA's electronic invoice project has been an important step forward in its mission to spread the efficiencies and cost savings of a shared services unit across Hyatt's Australian and New Zealand hotels.
The Result
Some highlights of the impressive results achieved for Hyatt International include:
- Slashed invoice-processing time from 2 days to 15 minutes for each of the nine hotels (reducing total processing time down from 18 days to just 2.5 hours)
- Cut end-of-month reporting down from 10 days to 2 days.
- Reduced headcount from 6 to 3 FTE
- Automated Purchase Order approval workflow
- Significantly optimized and standardized existing processes
- Fax server integration eliminated need to print and enter data from 30,000 incoming faxes per year
- Digital invoice storage frees up considerable physical space, eliminating high cost of offsite storage and freight - hotels can now dispose of paper invoices after 3 months, rather than 7 years.
- Enabled access to real-time information; increased financial control and visibility
