Sometimes an invoice arrives in very remote places. One of the best examples is remote oil rigs, where paper invoices come with the delivery of goods which represent a few documents per day, typically less than five.
In order to be incorporated in the central AP office the document must be sent from these remote locations, but since the workers manning the rigs have for priority to find oil, the invoice processing is not a priority for the rig manager.
As a result, the invoices arrive by mail or courier to the central AP often with long delays and in poor condition or simply disappear all together. Although this is an extreme example, this traditional method has 3 major disadvantages: high time to process, inaccurate date and high cost to process.
How to Capture Invoices
The problem facing the company was how to capture the invoice and other business critical document images at the rig location with a minimum of distraction from the workers main job. They could not ask the rigger manager to work on a computer using some delicate and complicated software. They needed to find and implement a simple solution requiring little or no training. One of the first approaches was faxing the invoice but the quality of the images made it such that it was sometimes unreadable therefore causing more disruption to the men on the rig.
New Invoice Capture Software
The solution to this problem was a network scanning device made by Fujitsu, new interactive invoice capture software and the internet. This approach revolutionized the way the company handled paper invoices and data capture from these highly remote locations.
These remote rigs have a small mobile office that is linked to the rest of the world by phone and to the internet by modem. The solution is designed around a network scanner. These devices include both a high quality scanner and a full PC controller allowing applications to run directly from the scanner box. They are easy to install, require a single connection to the modem and you are ready to log on.
One of the must-haves for these remote sites, where no technical support exists, is the centralized management of the device. The Fujitsu fi6010N network scanner is centrally managed and requires no local configuration by the rig manager. They are really plug, logon and go devices.
Easy Interaction
Most interaction with the device is done through the touch screen. The screen clearly displays the virtual buttons that the user selects to control the process. Data is entered through the integrated key board, an important aspect if one wants to make the data entry fast and not frustrating. The screen is wide enough to clearly display the image of the document in full width for easy reading and full document view is good enough to perform the image quality control not available in other communication devices like fax machines or MFP.
Automatically Transfer Data
After logging on for security purposes the rig manager selects the invoice or other document applications and inserts the documents in the scanner. The device will scan the image and automatically perform a full page OCR.
To enter the associated Data the user can either key the data through the integrated keyboard or directly point in the image at the field, the corresponding OCR result is automatically transferred to the selected data field. If the invoice does not balance or if a business rules is not matched the system will highlight the suspected fields
Upon data capture completion and validation, simply pressing the send button will transfer the invoice image and capture data to the central AP office, where it can be merged directly in the authorization workflow.
The Future of Invoice Capture
This method of capturing invoices are not limited to remote oil rigs, but everywhere with decentralized receiving of invoices, especially where the managers primary task is non-finance related and the handling of invoices is a distraction.
In the near future, we will see more of the network appliances integrating with these devices and allowing the non-desk ridden professionals to perform quickly and accurately tasks that they would have a tendency to procrastinate.
