AAC Systems and Kodak Alaris Partner to Transform Accounts Payable
From our headquarters in Maidenhead, UK, AAC Systems has been a data capture and information management solutions specialist for almost twenty years, helping organizations eliminate the burden of legacy paper-based processes. With a consultative approach, we design, develop, and implement technology and process solutions that enable our customers to improve productivity, save money, and streamline critical business workflows.
Kodak Alaris has been a dedicated partner to AAC Systems for the same period. We have relied on their industry-leading document scanners and IDP software to help us deliver custom document management and workflow automation solutions to our customers around the world.
Now we’re excited to roll out our new AAC Accounts Payable Cloud solution, powered by KODAK Info Input Solution, which we believe is the best intelligent document processing platform for automatically classifying, extracting, and validating data with extremely high precision.
Leveraging the Power of Document Intelligence in the Cloud
We created a cloud-enabled solution that delivers fast and accurate data extraction and validation for invoice processing and approval workflows. We worked with Kodak Alaris to explore how best to leverage Info Input Solution, and together, we successfully created a SaaS solution on Azure that automates business-critical accounts payable processes, in the cloud, for our clients.
The new AAC Accounts Payable Cloud solution seamlessly extracts key data such as supplier name, invoice date and number, total amount, PO number, etc. from each captured invoice—and automatically validates it against current system information. The results can be quickly verified by the end user and automatically directed to the client’s ERP system.
Manual AP Workflows Hinder Productivity
Our customer base includes local and central government agencies as well as large corporates and SMEs. The biggest pain point our customers face is the vast volume of email and the manual effort required to accurately classify information and route it to the relevant teams for onward processing.
This has become increasingly prevalent within the accounts payable process, with our clients frustrated by the time and resources required to manually input key data into financial systems before working through the approval and payment processes, which can take as many as one to two weeks and often creates bottlenecks in the supply chain.
A Flexible, Scalable System that Accelerates Productivity
KODAK Info Input Solution is an end-to-end IDP platform built around Kodak Alaris’ unique Open IntelligenceTM design, which offers fast time-to-value by leveraging pre-built specialized AI models out of the box for the most common document types, such as claim forms and invoices, as well as custom models specific to each client’s unique document types.
We also like that Info Input is technology agnostic and integrates easily with advanced document AI services from industry leaders such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, giving our customers open options and helping to deliver remarkable accuracy and high levels of intelligent automation.
By providing us with access to Info Input Solution, Kodak Alaris has enabled us to offer our clients a simple, scalable solution that requires no IT intervention. It’s easy to onboard users and it perfectly streamlines the accounts payable process. Clients sign up and log in to our new Azure-based platform to access their company’s mailbox or folder. It’s easy to onboard any type of document and transform the data contained within into actionable information.
There are many other aspects of Info Input Solution that really stood out to us. By enabling our customers to leverage the cloud AI services from Google and Microsoft, the solution is fully adaptive and self-learning, so it continually improves in speed and precision while minimizing human effort. The metadata is also highly configurable for our clients’ onward systems, which is a big plus.
We’ve been able to integrate custom business rules into our new Accounts Payable Cloud platform, such as matching data against POs and enabling user-driven approval and exception workflows. We also created custom workflows to route information through various stakeholders, from buyers to budget holders to the finance director.
One of the biggest advantages of this cloud-based platform is that it enables fast and straightforward deployment. Now we can support our customers’ cloud-first strategies. It’s flexible, scalable, and highly secure on Azure, with OpenID Connect for single sign-on and two-factor authentication all supported.
A Partnership Built on Trust and Positioned for Expansion
Over the past few months, we have had tremendous support from the Kodak Alaris team as we’ve been working on finalizing the Accounts Payable Cloud project and going live. We’re excited for the future and ready to help transform the accounts payable function for our customers—but this is only the start. This cloud solution is not limited to the accounts payable process. It’s scalable and we can leverage the same powerful capabilities to include delivery notes, remittance notes, or purchase orders for example, and further expand our cloud offering to add even more value to our customer base.
