DocWorks - the electronic filing cabinet

Utility Company endorses new technology to slash operating costs -- and improve service

The client is one of the largest unregulated suppliers of energy products in the United States. The client serves commercial clients in the Northeast, Midwest, and West regions of the U.S. as well as other locations that permit energy deregulation.

The utility provides contracted services that aids commercial clients to effectively plan and manage their annual energy budgets, therefore the clients are protected from the swings and fluctuations of energy pricing in the open market. Commercial clients contract annually for gas and electricity and thus receive guaranteed pricing.

The utility processes utility bills through its own office. In the billing process, the client receives energy bills from its suppliers and processes the billing through its computerized accounting system. Formerly five personnel performed a manual data entry function and keying as many as 50 fields and 2600 characters from approximately 14,000 utility bills each month. The average input was twenty invoices an hour with a stated goal for NSC of one hundred invoices per hour.

NSC provided a comprehensive solution that allowed the client to eliminate the manual data entry functions completely. Based on the sophistication of its automated forms processing applications software, NSC TechWorks developed a customized system that extracts up to 2600 characters from each invoice and passes the data to the client's accounting system, including the requirement to pass the data to as many as thirteen business units with up to twenty people for A/P documents approval.

Once the automated data extraction solution is fully functional, a second implementation phase is planned which will completely eliminate all of the filing, retrieval, and re-filing of the invoice documents. NSC TechWorks has developed a best of breed document management system that allows a user to retrieve imaged documents via the internet. The DocWorks™ document management system has been tested independently and found to be up to 9 times faster than its competitors in all areas relative to the speed of delivering documents to the user's desktop computer. DocWorks™ has also been designed to interface directly with all automated forms processing/data entry applications.

In the second phase of the implementation, NSC TechWorks designed a fully automated process that allows the client's staff to simply scan invoice documents and eliminate all other manual paper handling. Once scanned, Metadata or text is extracted from the invoices and routed to the accounting system. In parallel, the image of the invoice and a secondary data set (used as the index values or search criteria for the retrieval of documents) are bundled, transmitted, and automatically imported into DocWorks in one clean process.

Now with a single scanning operation, all data is processed and the documents are filed for immediately for access by accounting and customer service staff without any manual paper management processes.

NSC's new automated solution eliminates over 99% of manual keying of data, saves on all of the tedious paper filing, saves 100% of the time required for filing and accessing invoice documents, and saves thousands of hours annually by utilizing technology to professionalize daily business processes with an immediate ROI.