Wood-Mizer Re-Deploys DocStar ECM + IDC for AP and Achieves 96% Efficiency

From Innovative Manufacturer to Paperless Pioneer

Since 1982, Wood-Mizer has earned the reputation as the world’s largest manufacturer of portable band sawmills with more than 80,000 sawmills sold in 120 countries around the globe. Today, Wood-Mizer offers an extensive line of portable sawmills, industrial headrigs, resaws, edgers, kilns, log splitters, material handling equipment, bandsaw blades and blade maintenance equipment for woodworking hobbyists and forestry professionals all over the world.

Wood-Mizer initially implemented DocStar in 2015 as part of an enterprise-wide initiative to go paperless across the organization. The implementation included accounting and AP departments, with full integration with their Infor Syteline ERP system. The deployment was successful, and DocStar quickly became popular among users for its intuitive interface and customization capabilities.

However, in February 2021, Wood-Mizer made the decision to transition their AP processing to SAP Concur Invoice, an outsourced solution costing $4,300 per month. While continuing to use DocStar ECM for other document management needs, including Sales Order Fulfillment documents, they moved to the SAP platform which offered services including invoice receipt at a lockbox, scanning/OCR processing, verification by offshore staff, and payment processing.

The Cost of Inflexibility

After just over a year of using SAP Concur Invoice, Wood-Mizer found themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the solution. Despite the comprehensive service offering, the platform proved to be extremely expensive and inflexible, creating more challenges than it solved.

The lack of customization options made it difficult to adapt workflows to Wood-Mizer’s specific needs, particularly when it came to automated approval routing and handling exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Integration with their updated ERP system, Infor Cloud Suite Industrial (CSI), was limited, creating information silos and requiring manual updates to their ERP system. For a company processing approximately 60,000 invoices annually, these inefficiencies were significant. The outsourced approach to AP processing, while conceptually appealing, resulted in a loss of control over critical financial processes.

By January 2024, Wood-Mizer had reached a decision point. The high costs and inflexibility of SAP Concur Invoice had become untenable, and they chose to return to a solution they knew worked well for their organization – DocStar ECM with Intelligent Data Capture (IDC).

Seamless Return to Proven Solution

The transition back to DocStar ECM for AP processing was remarkably smooth. Having maintained DocStar ECM for other document management needs throughout the organization, including Sales Order Fulfillment, Wood-Mizer already had the infrastructure and user familiarity in place. The implementation team focused on ensuring DocStar ECM was fully integrated with the successor ERP product to Syteline, Infor Cloud Suite Industrial (CSI).

The DocStar ECM solution was configured to optimize AP workflows, leveraging the Intelligent Data Capture capabilities to automatically extract data from the approximately 60,000 invoices Wood-Mizer processes annually. Custom workflows were established to route invoices appropriately, match them against purchase orders, and facilitate automated approvals with the ability to handle exceptions on a case-by-case basis – all tailored specifically to Wood-Mizer’s business processes and directly integrated with their Infor CSI system for automatic updates.