20 BACK OFFICE
JLP CUTS
MATCHING John Lewis Partnership (JLP) recently revealed it was implementing Didos, a specialist invoice matching engine from retail IT specialists Itim. To be used by both John Lewis and
Waitrose from February 2012, Didos is a single invoice processing system designed to enhance the Partnership’s invoice processing at its new business service centre in Bracknell to cut costs and improve effi ciency. JLP wanted to overcome technology
restrictions and implement a single invoice processing system to combine its operations and benefi t from the automated functionality that Didos provides. As well as automating invoice processing with the Didos Automatic Query Resolution tools, JLP also hopes to achieve an improved automatic (unattended) invoice approval rate, full visibility of future payment liabilities, management and recovery processes for overcharged invoices, and comprehensive performance reporting to identify areas for improvement in upstream and downstream systems. James Wyper, goods for resale
invoice matching and e-invoicing lead at Partnership Services, the business services division of JLP, commented: “We selected Itim for both its functionality and its cost- effectiveness. Since signing the contract with Itim in June 2011, it has already met our expectations with strong support, and we have a very high degree of confi dence in the project ahead of next year’s launch.” Wyper added: “The Didos solution has
a range of benefi ts which feed through to effi ciency gains in our business. Although it will take some time to measure the precise fi nancial impact of these, we will expect greater automation in fi nancial processing teams, improved information on root cause of invoice mismatches and improved internal process control, all of which translates to delivering improved customer service.”
RETAIL TECHNOLOGY NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011
COSTS WITH INVOICE
PORTMAN TRAVEL UNIFIES CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS
P
ortman Travel, one of the UK’s largest independent business travel companies, has deployed a ShoreTel
unifi ed communications (UC) system along with a ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Centre in order to create a single, integrated communications infrastructure. The company replaced its legacy
telephony system with the help of ShoreTel’s partner, Solar Communications. The system’s distributed architecture and resilience helps improve customer service by directing customer calls to a consultant who can meet their requirements, even if the particular offi ce that the customer called is unavailable at that moment. The time savings arising from standardisation is expected to save the company more than £30,000 a year. “The ShoreTel system enables us to maintain excellent service levels as well as provide total reliability for customer communication,” said James Baldwin, senior vice president of technology at Portman Travel. “ShoreTel went above and beyond our criteria with simplicity, fl exibility and the ability to integrate with third-party applications. The new solution has allowed us to share best
practice much more than we did previously because of the easy-to-use document sharing application.” “As budgets continue to tighten, it is
more important than ever for enterprises to focus on cost avoidance to control travel spend,” said Adrian Parkes, chief commercial offi cer at Portman Travel. “ShoreTel’s advanced video conferencing service is just one of the tools Portman will be using to help its customers reduce expenditure by eliminating unnecessary travel. We are working closely with ShoreTel to implement further innovative cost avoidance strategies across the board.”
EMAIL RETRIEVAL
HAMPERS PRODUCTIVITY GFI Software recently released research that found 66% of UK businesses say employee requests for deleted email retrieval negatively impact IT staff productivity. It also showed that UK businesses were failing to maximise the effi ciency with which they
extract useful business intelligence from archived email. The majority of businesses valued this information – including for analysis of
communication trends and response times to customer queries, storage capacity monitoring and data leakage protection. But nearly half (42%) of those surveyed had no IT solution for managing and automating
email archive retention and retrieval, while 15% of respondents did not believe they were storing their email in the most cost-effective way, and almost a third (29%) did not know if their current process was cost effective. The independent blind survey of 201 IT decision makers in small and large UK organisations was conducted by Opinion Matters.
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