Large Media Company Automates Payables With huge payback
iAutomate reduces time to close

The Problem
Automating a cumbersome manual process

This large media company’s customer base had grown to over 1.3 million customers. While they are known for customer products that are innovative and high tech, the company continued to use manual processes in the back office, converting complex billing transactions into Excel spreadsheets. The process took 8 to 10 business days with three accountants, a supervisor and a manager – all working full time. As their customer base and billing complexities grew, so did the length of time it took to close each month-end cycle. The process was inefficient. Data entry became the primary employee function, leaving no time for more value-added work. Without the ability to drill down into a relational database, an in-depth trend analysis of customer data such as buying patterns, acquisition or attrition was not feasible.

The Goals
Reduce Clerical Time, Increase Value and Customer Intelligence

The Vice President of Financial Systems intended to increase billing efficiency and customer knowledge by purchasing a product that could:

• Reduce the information gathering process through automation from 200 man hours to four hours or less.
• Maintain multiple months of information in the system for regular and in-depth analytical review.
• Allow experienced employees to apply their expertise to more value added work such as trend analysis (rather than data entry).
• Reduce the likelihood of data-entry error.
• Provide the ability to drill-down into the data at any point and time.
• Be intuitive and not require technical assistance.

The Consequences

• Is not efficient.
• Is not scaleable.
• Increases likelihood of clerical error, overpayment or under billing.
• Allows no time for trend analysis.
• Continues an already lengthy closing period.

• Resources for a project of this complexity were not available in-house.

The Solution - iAutomate
Customize Anything

MENTIS' iAutomate service creates entirely dynamic, custom applications for organizations whose labor intensive processes make compliance difficult and/or which are no longer cost effective. The MENTIS pre-built framework components work independently from customizations and are built on the Oracle technology stack. This allows a quick ROI and no need for additional maintenance and support costs.

iAutomate Results
Save Time, Money and Resources While Increasing Business Intelligence

This media client reduced the information gathering process from 450 hours each month to a click of a button. Information gathering now runs in the background of a customized application built on the iAutomate framework and takes only two hours. This company operates in multiple states and, prior to the iAutomate application, had used a system which generated 20,000 pages of customer billing which were then manually entered into Excel. This had been the only means available to accommodate the complexities of a wide variety of customers, to manage very dynamic payables rules, and to determine what revenue would be generated. The payables team was under high stress in an error prone, memory- driven and lengthy clerical process. If a mistake was made, it was necessary to restart the entire process from the beginning, regardless of the progress made to that point. Since using the new custom application, no printing or entering has been required, saving money on paper and other office supplies. Over half of the department has been repurposed into other needed and valuable positions, thereby maximizing employee expertise and time.

All processes are automated, so little training time or technical assistance is required. The users are able to refer to an online, context sensitive and highly intuitive help mechanism anywhere in the system. IT needed only add the tool into their back up system, but otherwise was not affected by additional work, cost or expense.

Before bringing in MENTIS’ iAutomate, in-depth analysis of customer and billing trends were nearly impossible. The marketing department had to wait 20-30 days to receive even the simplest information. With the new application, all relevant information can be generated in four hours and is available on the first day of the billing cycle. The company can now take charge of customer and market trends and take advantage of high-level as well as very deep, cross-trend reporting. Marketing and Sales have the tools to gain more business intelligence than ever before.

The application built on the iAutomate framework returned on investment in four months. It has been so successful in the Accounting Department that other leaders within the organization are inspired to automate processes that previously seemed too difficult or complex. Using iAutomate as a framework for a custom application has not only significantly impacted efficiency and expenses but has also enabled a very forward thinking approach to the overall business.