Laird Consolidates Finance and Gains Control of AP with docAlpha, QAD, and DocLib

Laird, a world leader in engineering and electronics manufacturing, decided to consolidate and centralize its finance operations.

Around 2014, Laird, a world leader in engineering and electronics manufacturing, with nearly 50 offices worldwide, decided to consolidate and centralize its finance operations.

Laird’s new model focused on consolidating financial operation and transforming 50 teams into three: one for the U.S., one for Europe and one for Asia.

The newly-formed Laird Financial Shared Services Center would be empowered to more quickly access financial data, generate reports, conduct analysis and support business decisions and manage financial operations for the organization.

To do so, however, the company needed a way to digitize its AP process and eliminate the dependency on paper invoices and manual approval routing.

Digitizing Accounts Payable and Automating Approvals and G/L Coding

To leverage its existing QAD enterprise resource system, Laird implemented the DocLib enterprise document management system to handle its digitized AP documents and support an automated process for routing and approval.

The integration of QAD and DocLib allowed Laird to centralize its operations and deliver access to data and documents to support business decisions and automate transaction data entry.

To make the most of BOTH systems and eliminate the bottlenecks of manual document sorting and data extraction/entry, Laird took advantage of the docAlpha digital transformation platform from Artsyl Technologies.

According to Laird Accounting Supervisor Jiri Slavik, implementing a system to efficiently and intelligently digitize invoices and other AP documents, was key to achieving Laird’s vision for more agile, centralized financial operations.

With docAlpha, Laird could rely on a system capable of automatically classifying documents, extracting relevant data and filing those documents into DocLib, along with that data, automatically.

“We receive invoices in our mailbox, we process them through docAlpha, and then everything flows to DocLib,” Slavik explained. “With PO invoices DocLib gets the information from QAD. With non-PO, we have a list of approvers and DocLib takes care of forwarding the workload to whoever has to approve it. When it comes back to us, we validate all the information and just hit a button to flow everything into QAD so it’s ready to be paid.

To learn more about how docAlpha allowed Laird to centralize operations and gain control over accounts payable, read the full case study

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