Paragon Films Combines docAlpha and Dynamics AX to Automate Its Payables Process and Boost ROI for their New ERP investment

Implementing More Cost-Effective AP Processes and Gaining Control Over Procurement Elevates the Role and Impact of AP Staff Members

The Challenge

In 2015, Paragon Films began the process of migrating from their legacy IBM AS/400 ERP system to a new ERP that would offer the company greater flexibility reduce the maintenance/admin burden on IT and set the stage for future growth and innovation.

According to Paragon Films CIO Kenny Mullican, the company chose Microsoft Dynamics AX and the system to better manage their business data. A successful ERP implementation led to exploring new and better ways to handle paper and digital documents, and automate the processes supported by their ERP.

“Moving to an ERP system that looks and works like other Microsoft products made life a lot better,” Mullican said, “But there was still that paper side of things. So, our AP department would still typically have to do everything manually.”

Aside from the inherent cost and inefficiencies of manual processing, Paragon’s old approach meant a lack of visibility and auditability for the process.

“Later on down the road when the auditors would come in and say, “Alright, let’s see your paper trail”, it really was a paper trail,” Mullican said.

“It meant having to go and physically find a particular invoice and see where it was that that manager had written the coding on it and written their own approval signature on it and then see where it was recorded in the system,” Mullican added.

Clearly, Paragon saw an opportunity for process improvement.

The Solution

According to Mullican, Paragon Films chose to implement the DocLink enterprise content management system from Altec to handle their business documents in a way that was streamlined and more efficient. DocLink’s well established integration with

One key component in that decision was DocLink’s ability to intelligently extract data from Paragon’s vendor invoices, which then could be used to automate document handling, approval routing and G/L coding, all supported by DocLink with integration to Microsoft Dynamics AX.

The docAlpha Transformation Platform from Artsyl, integrated with DocLink, provides that critical intelligent capture component, allowing Mullican and Paragon Films to get even more value and performance from the ERP and ECM systems they’ve invested time and money in.

By relying on docAlpha’s intelligent capture capabilities, the AP team doesn’t have to worry about manually filing and sorting invoices or manually keying information into their ERP system. docAlpha identifies and extracts actionable data from scanned paper or native digital invoices and passes that data to the DocLink ECM. That data informs their accounts payable approval workflow engine to route everything for coding and approval.

The Results

According to Mullican, merging the capabilities of docAlpha with Dynamics AX and docAlpha will help Paragon Films to achieve a new level of control over their AP process, while maintaining or increasing efficiency.

Beyond simply supporting their existing AP process, DocLink and docAlpha actually gave the Paragon AP team the flexibility to reinvent their process in a way that allowed for additional levels of accountability and control.

“With the new system in place, we can create process workflows that involve multiple people, with multiple departments and multiple levels of authority, without being over-burdened by complexity,” Mullican said, “DocLink and docAlpha keeps it simple for us.”

The DocLink further streamlines Paragon Films’s purchase requisition process by automatically matching purchase orders generated from the requisition process, with quotes and invoices received from suppliers. Key to that process is having a system like docAlpha that can extract data automatically from all those documents to support the matching process, without having to enter all the information manually.

According to Mullican, the business impact of the newly-defined AP process has been significant for Paragon Films.

“Putting a process in place to implement greater visibility and control over purchasing and invoice approval has been hugely beneficial,” said Mullican, “It has a tremendous impact on our staff productivity and work satisfaction.”