Leeco Steel steps off the paper trail with MetaViewer's paperless solution.

Situation

Leeco Steel has a rich history spanning 132 years. From its creation on Chicago’s West Side in 1882 to today with eleven locations in the United States, Canada, Chile and Mexico. Leeco’s rapid growth and steel industry leadership required the company to increase their efficiency and look to the MetaViewer solution for assistance. Leeco Steel has spent more than a century building its reputation as a premier supplier of carbon, HSLA and alloy steels. In the past years, the company has seen exponential growth, adding nine additional facilities within the U.S., Chile, Canada and Mexico.

“A lot happened at the end of 2013,” CFO Mark Krzmarzick said. “We saw a lot of growth and we didn’t want to just add more people, we needed to make everybody more efficient in preparation for our growth.”

Leeco Steel was using a competitor’s imaging system with their Microsoft Dynamics GP platform, but found they were growing more than the product could handle.

“We needed to look elsewhere for a few reasons,” Krzmarzick said. “Web access and the ability for our IT department to make their own internal changes were very important, and over the years we incurred quite a bit of programming expense with our previous imaging vendor because of it.”

MetaViewer allowed Leeco the ability and independence to manage their own system.

Leeco’s system administrator George Hock added, “Our previous solution did its job for five years, but we were looking for something to automate the entire process. There was too much manual entry and we wanted to eliminate that.”

“We were seeing remarkable growth,” Krzmarzick said. “We needed to make a choice; make a technology investment on our current platform or look for a better solution.”

Solution

Leeco Steel went in search of a new solution that could streamline the AP process and expand into other departments as the company continued to grow. Krzmarzick and his team found it in MetaViewer at the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence conference.

The Leeco team realized MetaViewer had the capabilities they were looking for and scheduled a demo. “I was sold after viewing the demo,” Hock said. “User time is cut dramatically because MetaViewer can be used simultaneously with Dynamics GP. We could do all of our PO reconciliation and imaging directly in MetaViewer.”

“The PO reconciliation and profile builder were big points with us,” Krzmarzick added. “Plus the price point was affordable. It was a practical solution that matched our needs.”

Leeco implemented an AP automation and workflow using Metafile’s MetaViewer solution, which provides the ability to scan paper invoices, directly import electronic invoices, index them, route them for approval and archive them. This automation eliminates the stacks of paper invoices that would be manually entered, causing stress and increasing possibility for errors.

MetaViewer captures information up front in order to further automate Leeco’s system, such as invoice type as well as locations and which mill it came from. It also builds folder structure, in which it scans the specific folders and, during the import process, maps the folder structure. MetaViewer pulls out the invoice type, location and where it should go, and the document immediately has a number of index fields. At the mill, the document is generated scanned and put into the appropriate folder.

The MetaViewer solution was also implemented in the AR department. The company was using a home-grown e-statement system to manage up to seven documents, including bank documents, credit applications and AR invoices. Invoices were sent to customers each evening from the system. The next day, a review of those invoices would be conducted and another email with the shipping bill and certifications was attached. This cumbersome, multi-step process was streamlined with MetaViewer’s ability to access Microsoft Dynamics GP, gather the related documents and send an all-inclusive packaged email containing all of the content that previously had to be sent individually. With MetaViewer, the entire process is wrapped up into one simple step.

The MetaViewer process drastically reduced the time needed to manage documents.

Results

Productivity has been enhanced since the merging of MetaViewer with their existing Dynamics GP platform. Leeco Steel was processing approximately 3,000 invoices through their AP department prior to the MetaViewer implementation, and now processes 3,600; a 20 percent increase. And the number continues to grow.

“I can’t even quantify the time and cost savings, but it is substantial,” Krzmarzick said. “Our AP department was pulling their hair out trying to reconcile invoices to receipts at month’s end, nothing else was getting done. Now our PO reconciliation process is automated and so much easier. At month’s end, our AP department isn’t stressed and can even schedule a vacation during that time!”

In addition, Leeco’s daily Received Not Invoiced (RNI) report, or accrued payables, previously documented $8 million worth of unpaid materials. With MetaViewer in place, their RNI report has been reduced down to only $1 million. This has resulted in fewer incorrectly vouchered receipts in the RNI report and has saved the accounts payable department time and accuracy.

“MetaViewer has worked well for us,” Hock said. “I would definitely recommend it for its flexibility and workflow processes. We have the ability to mold and modify the solution to stretch into other areas of our business, eliminating multiple software. Now we have one fully integrated solution that works across our entire (Microsoft Dynamics GP) ERP platform.”