Welcome to Five Fast Minutes, a quick monthly briefing from Optura. Five Fast Minutes is a summary of news, highlighted Optura product knowledge and crucial insights to help you tackle business process optimization.

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Sarbanes-Oxley and Optura: Helping Your Company Become Compliant and Show a Positive ROI

Corporate scandal and financial irregularities have become unfortunate buzzwords in big business and on Wall Street over the past few years. Cautionary tales of employees losing pensions, retirement funds and jobs have taken their toll on the public’s confidence in large companies.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA) was enacted to ensure that a company would have sufficient checks and balances on its accounting procedures; not just with more external audits, but internal process control systems to help a company become compliant from the inside out.

Optura provides solutions that can help with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and demonstrate a positive ROI through process optimization and automation. The more automated systems present in a controlled accounting process, the less chance for errors and irregularities, either accidental or intentional.

Specifically, Section 404 of the SOA requires an “internal control report”. This report must show how the management of your company is taking responsibility for accounting procedures and systems. It must also demonstrate the effectiveness of these internal controls. All of this is designed to restore confidence in the investment community about your company’s ability to govern itself financially.

The challenge: the manual processing of data, no matter how carefully scrutinized and monitored, will always contain the greatest margin for error in accounting procedures. If you want your internal process controls to be SOA compliant while also saving time and money, the key words are optimization & automation.

Optura has the tools your company will need to work through the process of SOA compliance and compliment your existing SAP platform with automated workflow systems. While SAP can drive business processes, Optura can control the flow of work within each process. This critical workflow is where ROI can be shown: increased staff efficiency, reduced administrative costs and accelerated cash flow.

Optura provides:

· Process solutions that deliver control combined with optimization
· Solutions that are repeatable and prepackaged
· Quantifiable return on investment
· Dynamic frame work for future system controls

SOA compliance is only the beginning with Optura. Once automated process controls are in place, Optura can also help your company build a more effective and solid foundation for future business success.

Optura is ready to help you:

-Shorten your order-to-cash cycles and streamline accounts receivable processes with RapidFlow AR Collection and Credit Management System.

-Move from purchase to payment more quickly and efficiently with RapidFlow Invoice Exception and Vendor Portal.

-Take control of your material masters with RapidFlow Material Master Data.

For More Information:
Click Here or visit our website at www.opentext.com

Ohio ASUG Chapter Meeting:

Accounts Payable and Vendor Portal Best Practices

Tom Walker, Senior Process Architect from Optura, presented at the Ohio ASUG Chapter Meeting on October 3, 2003 and focused his remarks on a few key Accounts Payable issues facing businesses today:

· The cost per invoice ratio is currently too high in most companies
· Late payments, lost invoices and duplicate payments often become the norm not the exception.
· There is a lack of process visibility and monitoring with current systems
· Inefficient internal productivity eliminates the possibility of reducing AP staffing levels
· Poor communication between process participants (Purchasing, Receiving, etc.)
· Cycle time is too long for exception resolution issues
· Compliancy with Sarbanes Oxley Act Section 404 related to internal control

Workflow solutions from Optura can be the key to bringing all these challenges under control. The central theme of workflow is turning isolated, separate activities into silos of knowledge that can be accessed by each participant in a process. For example, instead of vendors sending invoices to many different process holders, such as Project Managers, Buyers or Requisitioners, they would be able to send invoices to A/P directly. With workflow in place, A/P is then able to make this information available to each receiver, approver and buyer in the process so they can perform their function accurately and efficiently. Providing process control and visibility to the AP invoice exception processing helps management be assured that the company liabilities are properly stated in a timely and accurate manner as prescribed by the Sarbanes Oxley Act.

Walker also covered three Best Practices that dramatically improve A/P processes:

1. Centralizing invoice receipts. This provides immediate visibility to liabilities, reduces duplicate payments and improves vendor service.

2. Removing A/P from manual problem invoice resolution and follow-up. Benefits for this practice include eliminating late payment charges, negotiating better terms with vendors and improving internal efficiency.

3. Analyzing process data for continuous efficiency gains. Key benefits from this best practice are identifying exception reasons and problem vendors, quickly identifying & correcting process bottlenecks for continual improvement, and sharing metrics with internal stakeholders.

The presentation concluded with a discussion on Vendor Portal and the current state of most business relationships with vendors and A/P:

· Vendors are consistently seeking information on payments. Calling into a company for a status report is not only time consuming and manually driven, but archaically inefficient.
· Documenting and accessing vendor activity in a system has been, historically, very difficult. Following up on this activity is lacking because of visibility and poor tracking methods.
· Many Vendors don’t have access to EDI. Providing a solution where Vendors can enter invoices and associate them with an existing PO greatly enhances the process for both the Vendor and the Customer.
· Finally, duplicate invoices/payments are a thorn in the side of many companies and take too long for resolution.

Optura provides Business Process Optimization, SAP Workflow Automation and Vendor Portal technology to dramatically improve the interaction with Vendors and the subsequent processing of invoices with problems. Vendor Portal and RapidFlow for A/P Invoice Exception from Optura;

· Reduces the amount of time an employee spends answering vendor questions
· Empowers employees to focus on value-added responsibilities
· Decreases the cost of processing problem invoices
· Provides ability to increase the number of vendor relationships without increasing the headcount
· Provides the ability to monitor Vendor usage and perform continuous improvement

For More Information:
Click Here

Contact Optura 888-658-0990
www.opentext.com