Somerset County Council ‘BACS’ the OpenText RightFax UIX solution
The Customer:
Somerset County Council provides a diverse range of services to the public of Somerset, services which cover all ages and all walks of life. The County Council has been in existence for over 100 years, and is looking forward to continuing its service to the people of Somerset.
Part of the Council’s mission statement is “Somerset County Council will provide good quality services that are accessible, responsive and sustainable.”
The Challenges:
With this in mind, it is vital for the Council to control their business process management (BPM) by implementing solutions to automate processes. BPM solutions provide fully electronic communication, collaboration, process management and workflow automation. In an organisation such as a Council, where numerous participants manage a myriad of entities and resources across diversified projects, it becomes a key tool. A particular initial requirement for Somerset County Council was to automate document processing, in order to speed the process for sending accounts documentation, such as remittance advices.
After some evaluation the Council proceeded to upgrade their existing RightFax solution, distributed by ProcessFlows, to RightFax UIX. This offered the required functionality and integrates with their CedAr Financials system to distribute documents in a timely and efficient way.
Archie Needs, Principal Financial Systems Officer at Somerset County Council comments “We deal through a ProcessFlows Partner, Acal, and are extremely happy with our Account Manager, Tony Michael. I have found both the Acal and ProcessFlows staff both helpful and knowledgeable. As we already had a tried and tested RightFax solution for network faxing, and I was confident with the account management, it was a logical step to speak with them when we wanted to move towards BPM as part of the eprocurement/ modernisation agenda and also to secure some cost savings. RightFax UIX was proposed to us and met our specifications.”
RightFax was installed on a Dell server running Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 and a CedAr consultant was commissioned by the Council to create an output file in the right format for RightFax to recognise.
The Benefits:
Discussing the council’s utilisation of RightFax UIX, Archie says, “We currently use RightFax for electronically transmitting our BACS remittance advices from CedAr Financials. After each BACS run, a file is passed from our Sun UNIX box, which houses CedAr Financials, across to the Dell RightFax server. The remittances are then e-mailed/faxed to our suppliers and any non-deliverable/rejects are dealt with by the financial systems team using the RightFax utilities.“
RightFax UIX e-document delivery automates the exchange of business information. This is achieved by the integration of the solution with applications already utilised by the organisation, which may include email, desktop, CRM, ERP, document management, host, legacy and other business applications. The ability to provide complete e-document delivery and receipt undoubtedly reduces cost, speeds communication and improves business process efficiency.
Archie continues “over 81% are now sent electronically and we hope to increase this percentage. The savings will enable us to reduce the number of cheques produced and concentrate on paying more of our suppliers by BACS.“
RightFax UIX has enabled Somerset County Council to provide high-volume, low-cost, real-time e-document delivery of application generated documents, without changing their existing applications. Business information such as purchase orders, invoices and statements can now be electronically exchanged via fax, email or the Internet.
“The original business case identified that the additional set up costs would be recovered after about 9 months and after that we should see ongoing savings. We are confident this will be achieved. We remain in contact with our ProcessFlows Partner, Acal, and although there are no immediate plans to upgrade, we keep abreast of new technology to ensure the Council’s services are managed in the most cost effective and efficient way. Therefore, we are obviously interested in any new functionality which may become available in the RightFax UIX solution.” Archie concludes.
More Information
For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@processflows.co.uk.
