Vimto saving £100,000 on back of document management and imaging IT

Vimto, Panda and Sunkist brand owner Nichols reckons it’s saving more than £100,000 per annum as a result of consolidating its six separate financial departments into one shared services centre with the help of IT. And to make that possible it chose electronic document management and imaging software from Version One. Nichols’ IT manager Allan Doyle says: “Shared services would have been totally unworkable without Version One’s solutions. Each operating company’s financial department had up to 12 storage cabinets full of documents. The shared services office simply couldn’t accommodate all of these. “By electronically archiving all documents, physical storage has been eliminated. Version One’s technology has also solved the problem of how to get invoices approved quickly and easily when approvers are scattered all over the country.” Nichols integrated Version One’s technology on top of its Sage Line 500 ERP system, enabling shared services to create, deliver, store, retrieve and authorise the group’s financial documents directly from Sage. Version One’s technology also enables the electronic authorisation of purchase invoices via Nichols’ established WAN, replacing posted invoices for approval. Says Doyle: “Staff time is now much better utilised. Staff no longer need to hunt around in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes for financial documents, make multiple copies of documents and then manually process each and every one of them. All documents are now instantly retrievable at a click of a button and are electronically processed and delivered within seconds.”