Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), the information management company, today announced a new service for streamlining the way organizations receive, process and manage their accounts payable (AP) invoices. The Iron Mountain Electronic Invoice solution digitizes paper invoices and allows customers to manage these bills via an online tool that automates basic AP tasks like matching invoices to purchase orders and routing them for approval. By digitizing a traditionally paper-heavy process in accounts payable, Iron Mountain's invoice-processing offering frees up AP departments to focus on higher-level activities and enables organizations to run their AP process faster and with fewer mistakes.
Most companies still receive mostly paper invoices. With paper, accounts payable teams must manually check invoices against purchase orders and receipts, and they must manually seek payment approvals, passing invoices from reviewer to reviewer. In this model, the process moves as fast — or as slow — as the person who currently holds the invoice. This wastes time, leads to errors and, worse, doesn't allow the organization a holistic view into its cash flow or spending levels. Moving to electronic invoice receipt and automated workflow accelerates approvals, improves accounts payable process visibility and increases customers' ability to control spend and manage their cash flow.
"Waste Pro has grown rapidly since our creation in 2001, expanding both organically and by acquisition throughout seven southeastern states," said Don Phillips, CFO of Waste Pro USA, Inc. "That growth has greatly expanded our network of suppliers and business partners and increased the volume of paper flowing through our accounts payable department. Our processes were becoming increasingly more complex, and we required enhanced ability to work with suppliers and vendors, manage our payment cycle, and support our next decade of growth. We required a solution that would help us streamline electronic invoicing, remove paper from the process for quicker reviews and approvals and ultimately enable faster payments. Iron Mountain delivered on that need with the added benefit of making the solution flexible enough to support a gradual rollout to the entire company."
The Iron Mountain Electronic Invoice solution is powered by Corcentric's COR360 cloud-based accounts payable workflow automation platform. The online workflow tool makes it easier for organizations to access, identify and share invoices that require further review. By automating this part of the accounts payable workflow, organizations gain greater visibility to better capture supplier discounts, drive cost savings and meet compliance requirements for accounts payable. Organizations can further speed invoice processing times by using their mobile devices to access the solution. And, as a cloud-based offering, the solution integrates into ERP and payment-processing solutions, and can scale throughout the organization as needed.
"The sheer amount of information moving through accounts payable departments — much of it on paper — is slowing down payments and endangering supplier relationships," said Chris Churchill, senior vice president and general manager, Document Management Solutions for Iron Mountain. "Because it is so paper-intensive, accounts payable is an excellent example of a new wave of information management focused on outsourcing and automating manual processes for cost savings and improved compliance. Our expertise in helping companies better manage paper and digital information, as well as supporting the transitional period when an organization uses both, made accounts payable a natural addition to our services, and we're thrilled to help our customers improve this vital business process."
The four components of Iron Mountain's Electronic Invoice include:
- Virtual Shared-Service Center — Customers can set up a secure P.O. box, managed by Iron Mountain, for their vendors and suppliers to send paper invoices for digitization. Options for fax and email transmittal are available as well. Organizations can also eliminate paper invoices by having their suppliers submit electronic invoices and purchase orders to Iron Mountain's free self-service portal, in any file format (XML, ASCII, etc.);
- Cloud-Based Workflow Automation — This feature automatically matches invoices to purchase orders, routes invoices for review and approval, and streamlines the overall process before advancing to payment;
- Archiving and Destruction — Iron Mountain can store paper and electronic invoices or securely dispose of them depending on the organization's business or compliance requirements;
- Reporting & Dashboard Functionality — Reporting capabilities, coupled with real-time dashboards, provide greater visibility into spending and payment-cycle times, showing audit trails and workflow history to monitor discounts, identify cost-savings opportunities and support compliance requirements.
Iron Mountain will demonstrate the Iron Mountain Electronic Invoice solution at the Fusion 2012 conference in booth #225. For more on the new solution, visit www.storeaccessmanage.com/content/accountspayable.
About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) provides information storage and management services that help organizations lower the costs, risks and inefficiencies of managing their physical and digital data. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain manages billions of information assets, including business records, electronic files, medical data and more for organizations around the world. Visit www.ironmountain.com or follow the company on Twitter @IronMountain for more information.
