BACK OFFICE 19
LLOYDSPHARMACY PRESCRIBES INVOICE AUTOMATION L
loydspharmacy, the UK’s largest community pharmacy retailer, operates over 1,700 pharmacies located
predominantly in community and healthcare locations and dispenses around 120-million prescription items each year. The fi nance department originally
operated on a paper-based system when it decided that automating AP processes would deliver greater control and help enrich the company’s business intelligence (BI), transforming data into a business enabler. “We needed to improve the effi ciency
of our AP [Accounts Payable] function to cope with the anticipated growth in invoice volumes,” said Mark Fura, Lloydspharmacy fi nancial systems controller. “As far as we were concerned, invoice
tracking, electronic authorisation and archiving were just part of the picture,” Fura said. “We wanted to create links from our BI
and fi nancial systems to an image of a paper invoice, to provide the ultimate drill down on any enquiry.” Following an initial pilot programme, Basware Invoice Automation software was rolled out across all head offi ce departments for goods and services not for resale and then later applied to the direct pharmacy deliveries’ supply chain. “Thanks to Basware, we achieved all anticipated gains. We now have a full audit trail, are able to control who authorises what expenditure, and have an extensive data repository which interfaces with our BI application,” Fura said. “Furthermore, it takes just minutes to prepare detailed monthly accruals – compare this to the two days it took previously.” To boost performance and data accuracy
yet further, Lloydspharmacy wanted to reduce the number of paper invoices it processes
and has set a target date to completely replace these with electronic invoices. Currently, all paper invoices are outsourced to Basware’s Scan and Capture service, which scans and extracts key invoice information. Lloydspharmacy then receives the e-invoices via Basware Business Transactions straight into its Basware Invoice Automation solution. A three year e-invoicing supplier activation
programme is now underway and Basware, in close collaboration with the Lloydspharmacy project team, is managing the entire supplier communication and conversion process. “Our goal is to receive all invoices as
e-invoices as soon as possible and achieve immediate savings,” Fura explained. “Basware’s Connectivity Service makes it possible for us to do this and more. Basware is now project managing the conversion of our supplier base to e-invoices – through its Basware Activation Service – leaving us to focus on our business.”
HELLO BABY ENJOYS BACK OFFICE BENEFITS
As a user of e-commerce management software eSellerPro, Trevor Ginn, managing director of online nursery business Hello Baby, told Retail Technology there are three main benefi ts from implementing a back- offi ce system in to a retail business. “One of the most important benefi ts of introducing a back offi ce system such as eSellerPro is the ability to sell on multiple marketplaces” he said. “ This is not just the obvious ones like eBay UK and Amazon UK, but sites like Amazon and eBay in France and Germany, which we could never attempt to sell on without the help of eSellerPro to enable us to sell in volume. Selling on Amazon in Europe has boosted our sales by about 10%, while the system supports us
as we grow and take on more on more of eSellerPro’s functionality.” Ginn continued: “The second is the amount of time that an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system saves. eSellerPro in particular has lots of great time- saving features like automatic ordering, warehouse management and courier integration, which saves valuable time while also preventing mistakes. “The third is increased effi ciency,” he
added. “By using a fully integrated package, as a business we can work a lot smarter. For example, printing out courier labels directly from eSellerPro rather than doing this individually. We have also recently started
using automatic reordering, packing and listing on multiple marketplaces. Many online retailers restrict their growth and work unnecessarily hard by trying to save money on software, however we wanted a system that would streamline the pain of running an online business and allow us to focus on strategy.”
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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