Discover SI-FLOW and...
... forget about problems with the circulation of invoices in the company!
- Hard to track document storage location,
- Overdue payments, lost documents,
- financial penalties
- lack of information on financial liabilities
– these are typical problems of many enterprises related to the processing of various types of documentation in paper form. Registration and settlement of these documents can be very labor-intensive, and thus also expensive. It's time for change!
In the age of the Internet and the digital, the best way to eliminate problems related to traditional paper document circulation is to implement a solution for scanning and electronic document circulation. More and more companies are taking this step, both in the Polish and foreign markets.
Thanks to the electronic circulation of documents, companies reduce costs, shorten the document handling time (reduce the necessary manual activities and reduce the number of errors), and minimize the risk of unintentional suspension of document processing (which, for example, for invoices, may have a direct impact on the amount of interest on late payments). That's not all – among other advantages of electronic document circulation, it is also worth mentioning the full preview of historical data and easier access to archived documents.
For example, the flow of documents in a company consists of many stages. These are, among others:.:
- Acceptance of external documents,
- Creation of internal documents,
- Recording and registration of documents,
- Processing (work on received documents),
- Submission of documents to individual persons responsible for verifying them in terms of content and economy,
- Submission of documents for approval,
- Monitoring the flow of documents,
- Submission of verified, described, and accepted documents to the accounting department for verification and then accounting and payments,
- Archiving of documents,
- Destruction of documents.
SI-Consulting's answer to these needs, as well as solving problems related to document circulation, is SI-FLOW.
OUR SOLUTION
The SI-FLOW solution is a product supported and developed on an ongoing basis. It currently consists of workflows that handle invoices, purchase orders, asset documents, and delegations (both in terms of requesting and billing). It is a distributed tool, i.e. it can consist of four components. Two components are mandatory: the Circulation Management module and the Content Management system.
On the other hand, the Scan and OCR system and the Mobile Service module are optional. Components are an integral part of other computer systems or constitute an independent system themselves. Communication between them can take place over a local area network (LAN) or a global area network (WAN)..
The process of circulation of invoices in the company begins with the receipt of the paper version from the supplier to the department or person responsible. Electronic document circulation in the company begins in the next step, i.e. when registering the document. Paper documents can be marked with a barcode, scanned, recognized by the OCR system, and transferred to the SAP system. Further handling of the electronic document depends on its purpose and takes place already on the side of the SAP system.
The key component is the software written in the ABAP language and integrated with the SAP ERP system. This module is used to configure and manage the operation of electronic document circulation and also allows you to use the tool from the level of the ERP system. The component is primarily used to configure the types of supported documents, set the logic and paths of their circulation in the system, and assign users to the circulation.
An example of the division of roles in the SAP system is presented below.
A great advantage of the solution is the possibility of any configuration of the above roles. The user assigned to a given role is responsible for checking and possibly filling in additional metrics.
It also allows access from the SAP ERP level and allows for all kinds of reporting on the operation of the entire tool. The module can be divided into main parts: SAP ERP user interface, Administration Panel, User Configuration, and a set of additional tools (reports, printouts, notifications). The application includes support for purchase invoices, which can be divided into two main types:
- invoices posted directly in the FI financial module (without orders in the SAP system)
- invoices posted through the MM material management module (concerning orders in the SAP system).
In addition, each of these types is divided into several subtypes. The division of documents into types and subtypes affects the way they are processed.
The user has a full preview of the scanned document with the ability to scroll, move, scale, print, and save to the local computer disk.
Individual metric tabs contain information about invoice items, detailed supplier data, history of metric circulation in the system, information about attachments (any files can be attached to the metric – MS Office Word, MS Office Excel, PDF, etc.) and comments, i.e. textual information entered by subsequent participants in the document circulation.
The system can be equipped with several additional functionalities to facilitate work and supervise the circulation of purchase invoices:
- Breaking down metric items into accounting decrees by importing breaks from MS Office Excel files,
- Handling employee replacements for the system administrator or directly for a given user,
- Sending notifications via e-mail informing about the list of documents to be processed for a given document circulation participant,
- Reporting with metrics information in the system that are still in circulation or have already been accounted for,• Reporting with metrics information in the system that are still in circulation or have already been accounted for,
- Reporting working hours of selected employees on individual documents,
- The ability to go directly from accounting documents in standard SAP ERP transactions to the document metric and scan,
- Management of document workflow participants using standard SAP transactions to maintain the company's organizational structure.
Many analyses indicate that the vast majority of information held by the company is still in an unstructured form, which usually means storing it in the most expensive possible medium, which is paper. In addition to the high costs of administration and storage, paper is associated with long processing time (e.g. only one person at a time), difficult circulation throughout the business process, and the risk of loss of evidence or uncontrolled copying. Data in the form of HTML, e-mail, audio, video, text files, or spreadsheets are equally unfriendly to maintain.
In the process of document circulation, the user must have direct and quick access to all attachments regarding the documents being processed, as well as to the images of the documents themselves. Such data is stored using files on a separate server, and access to them is managed by the Content Management system. The stored files can be of any format, i.e. PDF, TIFF, DOC, XLS, TXT, etc. The basic functionality in the described scope is met by, among others, SAP Content Server for On-Premise solutions and SAP Document Management Service (for cloud solutions).
Before it enters the system, each paper document can be provided with a sticker with a bar code, with which it is scanned and saved on the server in the form of a TIFF or PDF file. All objects (scans) stored on the SAP Content Server have their unique identifier, which is saved in the SAP electronic invoice.
The document workflow process often involves company employees who do not necessarily have access to the SAP ERP system. In this case, the most advantageous solution is to enable participation in the circulation of documents using a web browser or mobile device. For this purpose, the solution is made available to the process participants using the solution in the SAP Fiori environment.
For whom?
Our solution is dedicated to all companies that use the SAP ERP system as an application supporting enterprise management.
SI-FLOW will be particularly interested in purchasing accounting and tax teams, but it involves many users. Suitable for use in many industries.
Benefits
- Unifying document handling throughout the company,
- One place to register purchase invoices,
- Streamlining and accelerating the processing and acceptance of documents;
- Reducing the risk of payment delays,
- Current information on the amount of costs, elimination of double payments,
- The ability to measure and evaluate the work of individual employees involved in document processing,
- Ongoing information on the status of documents being processed (including processing times, delays, etc.) for employees and company management,
- Complete path of documents (in particular invoices) for the audit,
- Control and ability to manage document circulation,
- Possible centralization of document registration and archiving processes,
- Replacing manual descriptions and approvals on paper documents with data entered in the SAP system,
- Fast, direct, and secure access to documents in digital archives from the system level.
Advantages
- One universal interface for entering and processing data for different types of metrics – a user who knows one workflow (e.g. invoice metrics) will find it much easier to process purchase order metrics,
- A uniform interface for configuring various workflows, which significantly translates into ease of learning how to administer tools,
- Using a single transaction instead of several standard ones is especially important in the context of people working with documents irregularly,
- Dedicated tabs for individual roles with specific fields made available for editing, no need for redundant data processing – a tailor-made solution,
- Combining related processes into a whole without the need to break them into separate workflows – an example of an invoice cancellation, where storing a document reopens a previously existing circuit instead of initiating a new one,
- The ability to configure the solution in detail, modify the circuits, and make them dependent on all available parameters,
- Great freedom in expanding and modifying individual elements. A proprietary solution built from scratch, which allows you to add much more comprehensive functionalities than can be achieved by extending the standard with a similar budget.
