DRM Waste Management Wastes Less Time on Data Entry & Invoice Processing with docAlpha & DocLink

By automating its payables process, DRM Waste Management scales operations seamlessly

The Challenge

DRM Waste Management, headquartered in New Jersey, manages over 2.5 million tons of waste annually for retail, wholesale, restaurants, fast food restaurants, pharmacies, banks, construction, grocery, shopping centers, distribution and warehouse facilities.

In the early 2000s, DRM’s business grew rapidly, nearly doubling in size as the company took on new and larger accounts. Its proven model for waste consolidation, management and recycling attracted the emerging box store and wholesale clubs, as the model for simplicity and cost reduction.

That model for simplicity and cost reduction was an approach that the company decided it needed to apply to its back office, scaling operations to support a growing business.

With over 1,000 invoices to process, file and manage each month, finding an automated solution to increase AP invoice processing efficiency would mean that DRM Waste Management could continue to expand operations and take on new accounts while allowing its existing staff to manage vendor invoices efficiently.

According to DRM Management Billing Verifier Ben Fetter, the company’s AP processes were completely manual and very labor intensive.

“Everything was done by hand,” Fetter said. “We would get the invoices and process it through spreadsheetsand do everything ourselves, and then get the checks out that way.”

The Solution

DRM Waste Management decided to implement the docAlpha Digital Transformation platform, integrated with its DocLink document management system handle its AP vendor invoice process in a way that reduced the time and effort for the company’s accounts payable staff.

DRM Waste Management’s DocLink document management system from Altec allows the AP team to securely store digital invoices and related documents for easy retrieval. Beyond managing invoices, DocLink automates the routing of invoices for review by the appropriate approvers, providing them with easy access to documents and to G/L coding information.

To streamline the process of getting documents into DocLink and enter the appropriate related vendor and invoice data, the docAlpha platform from Artsyl intelligently extracts relevant information from invoices, then automatically files the documents and enters relevant metadata into DocLink.

According to Fetter, the introduction of DocLink, integrated with docAlpha dramatically streamlined the company’s AP invoice process.

“I feel like it’s a lot easier, because now they can just go into the system and check everything on the screen instead of doing it all manually,” Fetter said.

“It’s all there for them to just double check and then send through and get paid.”

Today, as DRM Waste Management continues to grow its business, Fetter and the AP team are able to keep pace, thanks to DocLink and docAlpha.