“Disrupt” is about entrepreneurs looking to create a product or service which offers something fresh to the market place by thinking in a truly different way.

One example in the book is the socks industry, which has seen little innovation for years yet people just accepted the status quo. To look at the industry in a new way, the business/design team answered the question, “What do we know and think about socks?” Responses included: socks match, they come in pairs, they look alike, some people buy all the same color, one in the pairs always gets lost, etc. By questioning this traditional thinking and asking “why”, the company “Little Missmatched” was born, based on socks that don’t match.  They sell a very successful line of accessories for tweens including socks which are sold in 3’s.  They’re different but complementary colors and designs -any of which can be worn together.

 When You “Think Different” You Make a Difference

When looking at many of our customers’ Accounts Payable departments, the current and largely manual invoice processes are the result of layering of systems, technologies and process exceptions. I can’t help believe that many companies would like to “think different.” Change does not come easily. Many believe in the expression “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”  More than likely, the process has been broken for years, but folks just “work around” it. If Little Missmatch can shake things up by appealing to tweens who don’t want to waste time matching socks… maybe Accounts Payable departments ought to look at their invoices  processes in a new way too.  By adopting an automated workflow solution, users don’t have to spend time matching invoices to PO’s because the system does this for them.

Change Can be Easier Than you Think

Today’s Cloud based offerings provide an opportunity to more fully automate your AP workflow with little upfront cost or capital investment. These solutions are designed with the  user in mind. Leveraging a Software-as-a-Service model puts  you in charge and no longer dependent upon IT to make a difference in  the process.

What if you never had to match socks again? And then, imagine if you could eliminate having to touch every invoice so you have more time to address the (mismatched) exceptions requiring your attention? With Iron Mountain, you’ll have an end to end records scanning, AP workflow and invoice process automation solution from a single provider. We call it Iron Mountain Electronic Invoice Solution.  A modular approach allows you the freedom to adopt all or just portions of the solution, allowing your department to start small and scale as needs evolve. This can directly improve the overall performance of your  department as well as speeding up processing time and improving visibility – the type of change that makes a real difference.

Electronic documents are invisible, insidious. No one can see the rising tide spill out of the servers — or rain down from the cloud — until it is too late. By the time firms realize they need an electronic document management strategy, it can be too late.

Invisible Torrent

Electronic documents are insidious because they are so easy to create. Computers have not yet brought us the Paperless Office of Tomorrow. But they have brought us plenty of paperless documents. No need to send them to the printer. No need even to type them. A few keystrokes of cut and paste and — voila! — repurposed text becomes a brand new document.

It may convey a brilliant new idea that disrupts business as usual in the best way. Or it may get lost in the database, forgotten except for its contribution to wasted storage space and slower database query responses. Or an electronic document may linger, long after it could lawfully have been deleted, only to surface in an eDiscovery proceeding and trigger its own flood of needless headaches.

Flood Control and More

Electronic document management is, at the most basic level, about taking control of the flood of electronic documents before it overwhelms a firm. But that is not all there is to managing electronic documents.

A well-crafted documents management strategy can help guide firms through the transition from traditional (and cumbersome) paper documents to a more streamlined electronic documents system. It can guide documents through their life cycle from creation to timely destruction, and can arm firms in advance to deal with litigation issues. It can ensure that critical documents are safely preserved and readily available when needed.

A robust documents management strategy involves specialized skills. This can pose a challenge to firms whose staff skill sets are focused on the company’s core business — not managing the electronic “paperwork” to keep things going.

The good news is that firms don’t need to divert their staff to handle electronic documents. They can call on expert specialists to manage the flood, allowing staff to continue their work undrenched.

As depicted in the infographic below, employees say they can spend half of their workday locating information needed to complete mission-critical tasks; 4 in 5 companies are concerned about their ability to access their contract files; IDC states that poorly organized information costs $14,000 per employee in lost productivity.

These document-centric processes keep you from focusing your resources on strategic tasks that directly impact your bottom line. Instead, employees across the company — from finance and accounting to human resources — are spending too many hours searching for information. And if you have high volumes of claims, invoices, receipts or other paper-based documents to manage, chances are the problem is even worse. Check out the benefits of improving your “paper process” so you can focus more on your core business needs.

View in high-res >>

This CFO knew that by virtually eliminating the paper, he could take one giant step towards changing the way his company did business.  With AP Automation and the adoption of the Iron Mountain Electronic Invoice Solution:

• GONE is the need for file cabinets to house paper invoices.
• GONE are redundant efforts trying to reconcile transactions that had gone un-documented or where back-up could not be found.
• GONE are the days of late payments, lost invoices and missed early-pay discounts.

This CFO was able to eliminate the paper DAY ONE.  By converting invoices to data at the outset of the process or capturing invoices electronically at source, your department moves from a data entry role to an empowered data management role. With better access to invoice information, GONE are the days of dealing with multiple vendor phone calls to resolve a single invoice issue. Now the majority of discrepancies are resolved via self- service portal or on the first call, saving valuable time and money.  Clear line of sight into the end-to-end invoice workflow process allows companies to capture early payment discounts driving direct bottom line savings.

Through the use of automation and dashboards for better reporting, AP staff can:

• Monitor inbound invoices for discount opportunities so they don’t miss the terms offered.
• Provide speedy invoice turnaround via automation which allows for dynamic discounting.
  • Proactively reaching out to vendors off-cycle can lead to much higher discounts (5-10% APR) as compared to the standard terms (1-2%NET on 30 days)
• More effectively manage suppliers who are open to this as it means a earlier cash payment

Better managing your cash never goes unnoticed. And let’s not forget the increase in job satisfaction when staff can add value and focus on more strategic initiatives they were trained to do.

If you would like to learn how other customers were able to “kick” the AP paper habit and really make a difference to their organization, see our “Showing the Way Guide” which features stories of customers like you tell how they automated their AP process and got rid of the paper.

But in AP, just exactly how do we save those all those working hours and do all your work in just four hours?  Taking a detailed look at what your department spends its time doing will show that the costs really are in people time, and in most cases, much of that time could be spent more profitably elsewhere. It’s not likely to be reduced to four hours, but time savings can be significant.

Dollars and Sense. AP Departments Spend Time:

Sorting mail, printing out electronic versions, copying printed invoices and terms, collating and reviewing invoices, identifying issues on the invoice, retrieving information from archives and printing or copying it, and responding to inquiries.

All this happens in the many hours we’d rather do without, because we still haven’t got to identifying exceptions let alone issue resolution or taking early payment discounts.

Maximize Your Work Hours

One way to maximize those four work hours is to out-task the non-strategic portion of invoice processing.  A lot of those unproductive activities disappear from your desk. Highly qualified partners, like Iron Mountain, can take over mail receipt, sorting, capture, indexing and automate invoice processing. They can store images which can be accessed by multiple users, hold the paper for 30 days and then destroy it. They can demonstrate quick ROI with little up-front costs.  Armed with industry best practices, proven metrics, and leading AP Automation Software, Iron Mountain aims to help you reduce invoice receipt and approval times AND save you enough of those four hours per day to get you noticed by Treasury. Some of your people might be more engaged and happier too when they get to work on more strategic initiatives.

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The Roadmap to Paperless

How far down the road to 100% paperless can you go? And how to do so?

Take our AP Quiz  and you will receive our white paper on “Operational and Strategic Benefits in Automating Accounts Payable” to gain new perspectives on AP automation, plus a chance win a $25 Amazon gift card.   We think that there may be different approaches depending on a variety of factors such as the nature of your business, the diversity and size of your vendor base etc.  But a key factor in receiving invoices electronically is how easy you make it for your vendors to get their invoices to you in a paperless manner. Take our quiz now and gain valuable insight on electronic invoicing.

High invoice volume suppliers, (bigger and more sophisticated companies) are more likely to send you electronic data files (true e-invoices) that you can ingest directly into ERP, because the process automation helps them just like it does you. Iron Mountain provides a Supplier Network at no cost to suppliers, with no file format restrictions and an on-boarding team that reaches out to suppliers to integrate their e-invoices.  This means that you can now receive 100% accurate e-invoices, directly with no resource or effort requirement from your side as the buying organization.

For your Lower volume suppliers, it might be that e-invoicing doesn’t grant the same efficiencies.  But Iron Mountain offers you help here as well, by providing a Supplier Portal where companies can submit their invoices directly into your system.  Both options are no cost to suppliers and ensure they get their invoices acknowledged quickly. And you get the benefit of receiving electronic data that you can pass directly into ERP for payment. The rest, the refuseniks, who want to stick with paper, can still use PDF attachments, email or plain paper. Iron Mountain has a “catch all” that can handle these too.

If you’re making an outsourcing decision and your goal is to lower costs, free up staff/resources and cut processing time, please consider working with Iron Mountain, who can provide a comprehensive service for practically any vendor. You can free up staff for more productive work and finally get to those projects that create more value for your company and improve your cash flow.

Making a business case for the Iron Mountain approach to AP internally should be straightforward since a) there is no significant up-front capital expense required and b) recurring processing costs should be lower. And of course we can archive, store, retrieve and destroy e-invoices as well.

Learn more about AP automation by taking our AP Quiz and receive a complimentary copy of our “Operational and Strategic Benefits in Automating Accounts Payable” white paper and you’ll also be entered to win a $25 Amazon gift card.  And if you want help in putting this together and finding the direct route to paperless AP then call us at 800-899-IRON, we’d be glad to talk.

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How are companies doing this? What about predictive coding? Will it really change the entire game?

According to e-discovery 2.0  blog “…technology-assisted review can achieve at least as high recall as manual review, and higher precision, at a fraction of the review effort, and hence, a fraction of the cost”. While it may seem that widespread adoption should be right around the corner with so much controversy in the courts, it is not likely to be adopted single bound. Old habits die hard.  Manual review has had a long and successful history. And what about the paper and your backup tapes?

Everyone can change. Just take Superman and Wonder Woman. Finally after many years of being single, they are getting together as a couple. And apparently, it is no casual thing, but very likely a longer term relationship. Discovery is changing with our super heroes. One key component of the discovery process that could have significant Return on Investment is analyzing your upfront processes for collection and archiving of potentially relevant information.

Due to escalating costs, and outcomes that often do not justify the investment, some of our customers are digitizing paper and then applying the same discovery techniques to the images indexes.

How can you reduce collection in the first place?

• One way is through improved governance and better management of your information. By working with a records management company who has years of experience developing and helping companies implement retention schedules, you can significantly reduce the information you need to manage for review.
• Additionally, by leveraging the years of metadata associated with this information, we’ll help you more quickly determine potentially responsive and relevant data. Identifying, capturing and indexing only potentially relevant data can dramatically reduce your collection.

These approaches lead, ultimately, to faster review times.

And faster review is the name of the game when it comes to saving time, meeting deadlines and reducing overall costs.  We find that clients in highly regulated and highly litigated areas such as pharmaceutical, manufacturing and energy are imaging, indexing and loading materials that they deem high risk into their review platform in advance of any litigation occurring.  As a result, they can more easily track if material has been used in prior matters and may already available in digital format further streamlining the process.

Before you invest in new analytical tools and predictive coding, take a look at how you can more intelligently manage your information to cut costs and meet increasing complex demands.  Using the newest techniques on information that should have been destroyed probably isn’t the right way to start.

Doesn’t it make sense to work with Iron Mountain, the leader in information management who manages records for 97% of the Fortune 1000, most likely including your information?

• With Iron Mountain Discovery Services, you can be confident that your records will be culled, imaged, indexed, Bates Stamped, redacted and load files created to meet your aggressive time scales.
• Our Tape Identification Service provides analysis and indexing so you‘ll know what you have.
• Data Restoration allows you to pull back what is needed from legacy backup tapes at any time.
• You‘ll have full accountability at every point in the process while saving time and money.

Change is with us. You don’t want to be left behind like Lois Lane. Take a new look forward, like the world’s ultimate power couple, and make changes in your discovery process.  If Superman and Wonder Woman can change after so many years, maybe it’s time you did too?

Please stop by booth # 107 at ACC in Orlando.  We look forward to seeing you.

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I remember when, just out of college, I was invited to one of the Big 8 Accounting Firms parties with a bunch of accountants, CPA’s and the like.  As an Art History and Sociology major, the idea of spending an evening with a bunch of number crunchers was not at the top of my list of things to do.  But having promised a friend I would go as his date, I found myself in a sea of bean counters.

Turns out the folks at the party were pretty interesting. Good story tellers and listeners.  In fact, as a lover of mysteries, I was intrigued that we had something in common… we got a buzz out of solving problems. We aren’t talking easy problems, but more complex ones where you need to uncover a number of clues which seem to have no connection until they lead you to the answer. Mysteries. Sometimes the answer is really hiding in plain view.  And I never knew Sherlock Holmes was an accountant!

One way that streamlining your AP processes leads to greater productivity is by getting people to manage the difficult problems, (which they find interesting), while the easy stuff is processed straight through. Automation should lead to greater visibility into the process for both internal and external customers, so problems get solved quickly, your staff’s experience and insight can be put to their proper use, and time and resources are freed up for more strategic initiatives.

If you’re making the decision to outtask your AP Process and your goal is to lower costs, free up staff/resources and cut processing time, you should consider working with a vendor who can provide this type of service and can archive the e-invoice as well. Making a business case should be straightforward since there will be no significant up-front capital expense required and recurring processing costs will be lower than your current process.

Your AP staff will focus on what they do best, i.e. quickly solve problems through greater visibility across the entire process, so you can focus on your strategic initiatives. As a result you’ll enable better spend control and capture early payment discounts in addition to gaining bottom line savings from automation.  And you just solved the mystery of how you turn AP from a cost center to a profit center.

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At a recent legal professional conference held in Chicago, I attended a session where Judge David Waxse, US District Court, Kansas City, Kansas spoke about some of the expectations outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  Rule 1 dictates a “just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding” which is the role of court system to protect and uphold. And he discussed new legislation is being written to help ensure that these safeguards are protected. He also stressed the importance of getting agreement from both parties as to the discovery approach at the pre-trial conference to avoid any major pitfalls later on in the case. Formalizing these agreements on all aspects of the discovery early in the process can result in better outcomes while saving time and money.

When I think about information management best practices and the role that companies such as Iron Mountain play, it strikes me that good information management is really critical to support system fairness.  If either party is unable to produce information needed to support a case in reasonable time for a reasonable cost, the justice system starts to break down.  As a non-biased third-party, we help companies make discovery a defensible business process—and apply best practices and principles to help manage costs.

So as you look to trim outside counsel fees, when it comes to responding to a litigation request, doesn’t it make sense to work with a company which manages information for 97% of the Fortune 1000 and can provide complete discovery services?

With Iron Mountain, you know where your information is at any point in the discovery process.  You’ll have full accountability from identification, culling, imaging, coding, redacting, Bates Stamping and delivering a load file to your review platform. Your information will be managed with industry leading best practices for retention and security.  Without the last minute rush, critical process hand- offs, added transportation cost and risks, you’ll streamline your process, meet your time lines and manage to your budget.  In short, you‘ll make discovery a repeatable business process and better control your discovery.

As validation, an April 2012 article from Inside Counsel by Ashley Post talks to ways of reducing spending which include:

1. Analyze workflows-reducing costs for costs cutting sake is not sustainable but you need to look at your processes and those of your business partners.
2. Evaluate law firms – many companies are looking are looking at new fee arrangements, cost per case and bringing more discovery in-house and using other types of service providers to cut costs. Experts say most companies in the Fortune 1000 spend 60 percent of their total legal spending on outside counsel.
3. Prevent Extra E-Discovery Expenses- In-house lawyers hate astronomical discovery costs. A recent FTI Consulting survey reveals that 94 percent of them find the cost of e-discovery “frustrating.”

So while Superman was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, it may likely require more diligence and creative ways to address discovery process to help ensure fairness on both sides and to arrive at a just outcome for all.

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Underscoring the Advantages of Digitization

By establishing itself as a fixture on its industry’s calendar, ALCTS’s Preservation Week has immediately increased awareness for the benefits and potential of innovative electronic document management techniques. Two of the most pressing concerns faced by organizations are limited storage spaces and tightening budgets.

By converting documents into electronic formats, archives can be instantly consolidated. Instead of leaving key documents in rows of filing cabinets and stacks of paper boxes, they can be stored on a central database. The original paper records can then either by securely shredded or shipped to an offsite holding facility to greatly reduce an organization’s storage footprint.

With this “new” floorspace available, expensive real-estate acquisitions can be postponed and possibilities for more open, collaborative office environments become possible. The financial benefits of document digitization also include increased employee productivity. Instead of wasting precious times digging through boxes, vital information is stored in a central location and available in an instant.

The main attraction for libraries, of course, is the role digitization plays in preservation. Original manuscripts from centuries ago can be digitized to ensure they will be around for generations to come. Likewise, companies can be certain that extra copies of crucial documents are reliably stored and consistently available – thus satisfying business continuity goals.

Various Formats, One Mode of Access

One of most powerful innovations brought on by digitization has been the ability to extend the functionality of content by displaying and distributing it to audiences in novel ways.

By placing old customer information into a new computerized database, advanced analytics can be applied to uncover important trends and insights that can shape business strategy.

Digitization also makes it easier to exchange documents between collaborators. Instead of passing around one master training manual in a three-ring binder, it can be accessed by any worker at any time if a company posts it on their employee portal.

The same can be said of all company information. Instead of searching for a cassette or DVD player to review audio interviews and video recordings, digitizing this content into modern formats make it easier to distributed and less vulnerable to degradation.

So, what lessons can we take away from Preservation Week and apply them year-long? How can innovative electronic document management techniques address the problems of limited storage spaces and tightening budgets for your business?

Iron Mountain’s Document Management Solutions help you create and manage a fully-integrated program – with complete visibility and access to all your business records, in whatever form they’re in and wherever they reside. Your business process will accelerate. Sound decision making will increase. Compliance will be more attainable.

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