JRN – KFC
Customer Profile
As the third largest KFC franchisee in the country, JRN, Inc. is based in Columbia, TN, employs 3,500 people, and owns and operates 157 KFC restaurants in 10 states.
Application
JRN is using a docSTAR Enterprise Turnkey System with 7 scanners, processing about 500 documents per day. The Accounts Payable department was the first to implement docSTAR. The payroll and executive departments adopted the system when they realized the efficiencies gained by the implementation.
JRN is currently not setup to use barcode, so OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is used to identify invoices. They have three scan stations in the Accounts Payable department. Each person logs into a station to scan and index his or her batch of documents. With a little finetuning, JRN has achieved a 98% accuracy level with OCR.
Since the quality of their vendor invoices varied, trying to OCR the actual invoice was out of the question. Instead, JRN generates a label for each invoice as it is entered in their Great Plains Accounting system. The label has the vendor name, vendor number, invoice number, invoice amount, and date. The label is then placed on the back of each invoice. The invoice front is scanned as a simple image and the back label is scanned using OCR for indexing. A document count is produced along with the printed labels to compare to the number of documents scanned to eliminate miss-feeds. The payroll department uses the same label concept for filing W-4’s.
The Problem
Improving efficiency was critically important at JRN because of the vast amount of paperwork generated each day.
“As we grow, so does the amount of paper that must be used and filed,” said Debbie Follis, Accounting Supervisor at JRN. “Operating in ten states means ten sales tax audits. Locating every piece of paper required for these audits was proving to be a challenge. If a bookkeeper had to answer questions concerning an invoice, they would have to go to the file room, retrieve the paper copy, review it with the area supervisor, possibly fax it, and then file the invoice again. The shear volume of vendor invoices ruled out manual indexing of documents.”
Space allocation for files also posed serious problems at JRN.
“We currently have 25 filing cabinets in our file room. The size of our file room has limited us to the cabinets we currently have. There is just no room for additional cabinets or files,” said Follis.
The Solution and The Benefits
Productivity has improved with the introduction of docSTAR at JRN.
“One of the biggest improvements with docSTAR is the ability to find invoices quickly and easily,” said Follis. “Because we no longer have to search for misfiled paper documents, information is more readily available, which saves us time and money.”
Customer Case Study “We can use our time more wisely with docSTAR, rather than spending it copying and faxing documents to share among the departments,” said Follis. “We are able to scan documents and share them immediately via email.”
“Multiple files are more efficiently handled with docSTAR,” Follis continued. “Documents are scanned once and then copies can be placed immediately into other files as necessary.”
The docSTAR system also impacts the bottom line directly through improved space allocation.
“Rather than create a file folder and hanging file we simply scan and file within docSTAR,” said Follis.
“We saw immediate savings because we did not need to purchase 4,000 file folders necessary for paper filing of our payables invoices for 2005.”
“We will eventually be able to remove the 25 filing cabinets currently in use and that room will be used for additional office storage. We will also be able to eliminate the expense of an outside storage facility to archive massive amounts of paper.”
“We also like the security aspects of docSTAR. Some departments have sensitive data, which by nature cannot be shared. The flexibility to grant certain levels of security between departments and even users is wonderful. I sometimes have payables documents that should not be viewed by all employees. Filing these in a secure classification rather than the group accounting class allows me to have better control of my information,” said Follis.
JRN expects that docSTAR will allow their business to grow without additional physical record storage requirements.
“We will no longer need additional file cabinets for the paper generated when we acquire new locations,” said Follis. “When we add employees, we will save valuable time with electronic transmission of employee files and other information.”
The docSTAR Integration Agent is being used to interface docSTAR with JRN’s Great Plains Accounting system. This interface will allow JRN to directly associate documents with their accounting data.
“When vendors inquire about a paid invoice, our staff will have the scanned copy of the invoice with the paid item in Great Plains,” said Follis. “This will save us even more time and improve out productivity. In the payroll department, an inquiry on an employee record will provide all the scanned paper documents for that employee, as well.”
Recently the Real Estate Department has begun using docSTAR. They maintain real estate contracts such as leases and purchases for 200 properties. These documents number in the thousands and most include dozens of pages.
The Design Department at JRN will soon be using docSTAR with a wide format scanner. Eventually all departments will utilize the system. JRN also plans to install docSTAR scan stations in their regional offices to eliminate faxing of documents.
“The docSTAR staff was very helpful in their knowledge of docSTAR and in establishing our first templates,” said Follis. They were very patient when I had an issue or problem. They encouraged us to use the system and become familiar with it so that we would be comfortable creating additional templates in the future. Our installation was seamless and we began using docSTAR the very day it was installed.”
