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Nissan had a business imperative to cease a Business Process Outsourcing contract that included paper courier and scanning services. The impact of terminating the contract would apply to nine Regional Business Units scattered throughout Europe supporting a total of 28 businesses.

Aside from the scope of the challenge the timeliness of implementation was also critical because any variance would mean that the entire outsourcing contract may have needed a further extension with a significant financial impact. The implementation plan needed to be comprehensive in the sense that it had to cater for configuration, user training and system handovers to local teams within a delivery period of less than five weeks.

"After standardising our European accounts payable processes and systems over the past three years we needed a solution to in-source the scanning and classification of financial documents back into our European regional businesses," explains Maria Nagy, Financial Projects, Nissan Europe Finance. "Before we implemented the solution a financial document would be received at the regional businesses, routed, sorted and classified and then sent for outsourced scanning and indexing on a daily basis. Once scanned the coded batch would be returned to our central accounts payable centre for import into the accounts payable system. The outsourced process meant that it could take up to five days for documents to reach our accounts payable system."

The solution deployed included Fujitsu fi-6130 workgroup scanners for every business unit together with software to ensure the safe transmission of the documents to the accounts payable system. KnowledgeLake Capture and Branch Capture Server technologies were introduced to meet the requirements for quality scanning, secure and timely transmission. The Fujitsu workgroup scanners were selected based on their small footprint, ease of use and the scanning volumes expected. The ease of use aspect enabled fast training of finance and back office administration staff and received positive feedback.

The system now enables regional teams to scan information locally and is designed to deal with volumes of around 1000 multi-page financial documents per day. Implementation of the solution and roll-out to the nine European Sites took less than five weeks which meant that contractual deadlines were met and that it was not necessary to extend outsourcing arrangements. The roll-out plan included onsite training and installation which was completed within as little as one day per location.

Multilingual operating instructions and training manuals were used to ensure that regional users were able and confident to use the solution. The implementation plan also made provision for business continuity by providing a Fujitsu scanner "hot-spare" at each of the key sites.

The solution has enabled 23 Nissan staff members across nine European sites to scan and index documents directly into the invoice processing system, which handles around 5000 multi-page documents per week. The time taken to convert a paper document to an electronic copy and to make the information available for accounts payable processing has been reduced by up to six working days.

Maria Nagy concludes: "By deploying the Fujitsu and KnowledgeLake solution, we now have a simple and robust solution that has reduced the turnaround time for payment by up to six working days. Furthermore, our 'supplier paid on time' metric was increased by 16% within the first three months after the system went live."
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