Captovation: Best Buy's AP Department

Captovation Capture Overview

Our Customers

“eCapture is very easy to use and has been able to handle all of our document capture needs right out of the box. The eCapture/AP system integration has really made our accounts payable process run smoothly and efficiently.”

Annette Kunkel,
Expense AP Accountant
Best Buy

Best Buy’s Accounts Payable Department Utilizes Unique Document Capture
System Integration to Process Invoices and other AP Expenses

Minneapolis-based Best Buy Co., Inc. is North America’s leading specialty retailer of consumer electronics, personal computers, entertainment software and appliances. The Company’s subsidiaries operate retail stores and/or web sites under the following names: Best Buy (BestBuy.com), Future Shop (FutureShop.ca), Geek Squad (GeekSquad.com), and Magnolia Hi-Fi (MagnoliaHiFi.com). Best Buy along with its subsidiaries reach consumers through nearly 1,900 retail stores in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Best Buy Co., Inc. currently operates retail stores in almost every state and is on track to have more than 550 stores nationwide by 2004. Best Buy brings customers an extensive selection of affordable, easy-to-use technology and entertainment products that improve their time in a fun, informative and no-pressure shopping environment, while maximizing the company’s profitability and offering shareholder value. Best Buy also offers an unparalleled online selection of your favorite brands round-the-clock through BestBuy.com.

During the 1990s, Best Buy experienced a huge growth in the number of U.S. stores. This store expansion also caused a growth in volume of paper being processed at corporate headquarters. Getting a better handle on all this paper became a major business priority for Best Buy.

Best Buy’s first step to better manage their paper began in 1995 when they purchased a document imaging and management system developed by Optika (www.optika.com) from AMI Imaging Systems – A Minneapolis-based Optika reseller and systems integrator. At that time, Optika’s document management system was known as FilePower. Best Buy used FilePower for the purposes of document imaging and electronic retrieval. During the years they used FilePower, Best Buy also used a custom document-scanning (capture) interface that was developed by an outside consulting agency.

For years, this document management system served Best Buy’s needs well. However, neither FilePower nor their custom scanning application was Y2K compliant. It became apparent that Best Buy would have to replace their FilePower system and custom scanning application. As Best Buy considered document management systems that would solve their Y2K problem, they also started thinking about a system that would offer similar functionality but improve overall efficiency. Specifically, they wanted a document management system that could perform advanced query searches and a document capture system that they could easily integrate with both of their front-end accounts payable (AP) systems – Oracle Financials and Millennium.

Best Buy worked closely with AMI Imaging Systems to find a combined document management/capture system that would help them fulfill these business needs. The first logical step that AMI recommended to Best Buy was for them to upgrade from Optika’s old FilePower product to their new Acorde system. Acorde is an enterprise content management software solution offering imaging, workflow, records management and collaboration tools that would give Best Buy the much-needed ability to perform advanced document queries.

As far as a new document capture system, AMI learned in its initial meetings with Best Buy that the company was looking for a system that would fulfill the following business needs: easily integrate with Millennium and Oracle Financials; offer the same integration support for both Millennium and Oracle, which would ensure that the data entry process for the two systems was the same; and a system that would reduce the cost of on-going development and support. It was also determined that it would be far too expensive to further customize Best Buy’s existing capture system, and therefore a new capture system was the best option.

In considering these capture system requirements, AMI recommended Captovation’s eCapture. Since eCapture is VBA (Visual Basic for applications) compatible, it could easily be customized and integrated with both Oracle and Millennium. Additionally, Captovation has been an Optika development partner for over nine years, which has allowed them to develop a tight integration between eCapture and Acorde. “We knew that this was going to be both a difficult and unique system integration at Best Buy, but we also felt that we had a good product offering that would help Best Buy achieve their business goals,” said Jerry Sweeney, Account Manager at AMI Imaging Systems.

The combined eCapture/Acorde system would be installed and used in Best Buy’s Corporate Systems and Data Solutions department, and eCapture would be integrated with Millennium to process Accounts Payable merchandise and music documents, and Oracle Financials 11i to process Accounts Payable expenses. eCapture would also be integrated with a web-based program called ARIBA that Best Buy uses to process employee expense reports.

The first project that AMI and Captovation jointly worked on for Best Buy was to design a way that eCapture could be integrated with Oracle Financials. The integration would allow invoice data from an Oracle session to be electronically transferred to ecIndex (eCapture’s production-level indexing component) data fields. Captovation wrote an ecIndex VBA macro that facilitates this data transfer. The macro works when a Best Buy indexing associate wants it to. That is, the data gets transferred when an indexing associate presses the F12 function key. The macro was designed this way so that the indexing associate could be sure that any data keyed into Oracle was correct before that same data would be populated within ecIndex.

With this new eCapture integration, Best Buy’s method of processing documents begins with the scanning process. AP associates batch the invoices by profile associated with the different invoices. A batch prefix is assigned to each batch, and the batch is scanned. Using a Bell & Howell II Copiscan scanner and ecScan, eCapture’s production-level scanning component, the document images are captured. During the scanning process, Patch Code recognition is enabled, which will later help separate documents during the indexing process.

After scanning, the document images appear within ecIndex in a table that lists the indexing operator’s number and they choose the oldest for keying. After accessing their document images with ecIndex, the indexing operator then launches their Oracle Financials session. Indexing associates enter the data off the invoice image that appears within ecIndex into Oracle. Best Buy’s 20 indexing associates all have 21-inch monitors, which allows them to run ecIndex and Oracle/Millennium side by side. This greatly helps reduce employee hand/eye fatigue.

After they are finished keying the data into Oracle, they press F12 on their keyboard to trigger the macro to populate the defined index values within ecIndex with the same data that was just entered into Oracle. If it is a multiple page document, the indexing associate instructs ecIndex to file to separator page, which causes ecIndex to populate the same data entered on the first page of the document into the field values of every following document until a Patch Code is found. The Patch Code signifies to the indexing associate that a new document (invoice) has been found and new indexing information is required. Finally, the images and index data are then committed (archived) from ecIndex and into Acorde where they can be searched and retrieved electronically.

Captovation developed a second eCapture macro to be used with Best Buy’s Millennium system. Millennium is a host-based accounting application that runs on the Best Buy mainframe. Captovation designed the macro to utilize a RUMBA^® terminal emulator so that a “screen scrape” could be performed from the emulator and into ecIndex. Indexing associates enter data from the invoice image appearing within ecIndex into Millennium, press F12, and that same data gets directly populated within ecIndex data fields. Again, the images and index data are committed from ecIndex and into the Acorde system.

eCapture’s ability to be customized also allowed Best Buy to implement a much-needed reporting tool that creates a custom audit database with a Windows-based interface. This reporting tool tracks daily performance levels of the indexing associates, and provides statistics for the number of document images indexed, number of document images accessed, etc.

Currently, Best Buy is processing about 10,000 invoices per day at their corporate headquarters. Best Buy definitely foresees this volume growing, but because their current eCapture/Acorde system works so well they believe that they will not have to increase their current staff to help process the documents.

“eCapture is very easy to use and has been able to handle all of our document capture needs right out of the box,” said Annette Kunkel, Expense AP Accountant at Best Buy. “The eCapture/AP system integration has really made our accounts payable process run smoothly and efficiently.”

The second project that AMI and Captovation worked on for Best Buy was to design a system that would reduce and ultimately eliminate the volume of expense reports that were being mailed to and manually processed at Best Buy’s corporate office. Previously, Best Buy employees would log on to Best Buy’s on-line employee expense system – ARIBA – fill out their expense report, print it, and mail the expense report to corporate. This process took too much time, incurred high postage costs, and sometimes caused AP employees at headquarters to be overwhelmed with the number of reports they had to process on a daily basis.

Best Buy envisioned a new system that would process the reports electronically. After discussing the idea with AMI, Best Buy decided to purchase two other eCapture components, ecAutoFile Server and ecImport Server, which they would integrate with their ARIBA system.

Just like before, Best Buy employees log on to ARIBA and fill out their expense report. They then print out the completed report, but this time a bar code is included on the print out. This bar code contains a unique ID that is used to identify each Best Buy employee. The employee then signs and faxes their expense report along with any receipts to the corporate office in Minneapolis.

The first eCapture component used in the process is ecImport Server – eCapture’s image import component. ecImport Server is configured so that it monitors Best Buy’s fax server – Fax Sr. from Omtool Inc – for incoming expense reports. When a fax is received at corporate, ecImport Server imports the fax image from Fax Sr. and into eCapture. During the importing process the fax is converted from its native state into a Group IV TIFF (tagged image file format), which is a standard format for most imaging systems. From there, the images are then sent to eCapture’s bar code recognition server, ecAutoFile Server, where the bar code data (unique ID) is extracted. If the report does not contain a barcode, ecAutoFile Server automatically routes the report to ecIndex where an indexing associate manually keys the data off of the report and then commits (archives) the images into Acorde. Images containing bar codes are automatically archived, along with the bar code data, by ecAutoFile Server directly into Acorde. Currently, the combined ARIBA/eCapture system processes about 2500 employee expense reports per week.

The biggest benefit with this new ARIBA process has been the savings on postage and overall time it was taking accounts payable associates to manually process the expense reports. From the time the person faxes the expense report with the attached barcode to the moment the expense report is imaged and archived into Acorde, little to no manual intervention is required. Therefore, overall labor hours involved in the process have been reduced.

Best Buy’s decision to purchase eCapture allowed them to meet their initial business needs. eCapture’s unique architecture allowed it to be integrated with Best Buy’s Oracle Financials and Millennium front-end accounts payable systems. It was important to Best Buy that the data entry process for Oracle and Millennium was the same to help reduce training requirements. Furthermore, the integration between Oracle and eCapture was implemented at the database level, which means the system will be able to easily adapt to future versions of Oracle. Most importantly however, Best Buy’s indexing associates see each invoice once and key it once. This has enabled Best Buy to get time-sensitive invoices processed more quickly and archived into Acorde where all Best Buy employees can perform advanced query searches to find specific documents.

Additionally, eCapture has also allowed Best Buy to almost completely eliminate on-going development costs for their capture system. With their old capture system, Best Buy had to continually add features and functionality, or large changes, to the program to meet their business needs. These development costs kept increasing and actually became more expensive than the initial cost of the custom capture software. eCapture, on the other hand, has allowed Best Buy to implement a complete capture system that met their current capture needs, and because of its architecture is open for future customization when small changes are necessary. In fact, it was determined by Best Buy that to integrate their old capture system with Acorde, Oracle and Millennium; it would have cost them five times more than the cost of eCapture. Best Buy was so happy with the implementation that they are considering eCapture/Acorde for three other applications as well as deploying the system corporate wide.