A&E Television Networks (AETN), a joint venture of The Hearst Corporation, Disney-ABC Television Group and NBC Universal, is an award-winning, international media company offering consumers a diverse communications environment ranging from television programming, to home videos/DVDs and music CDs, to Web sites, as well as supporting nationwide educational initiatives. For over a decade, the company was interested in streamlining the accounts payable process. They looked into various technologies including optical character recognition (OCR) and the latest imaging capabilities in order to find ways to enhance the visibility of invoices, but they never found the right solution.

AETN was dealing with a paper-based and labor-intensive process to approve invoices. This approach was prone to data entry errors, lost paperwork, bundles of weekly disbursements, and a backlog of paid documents that needed to be filed in one of their 36 file cabinets. "We needed to find a way to take the paper out of the accounts payable process. Not only would this eliminate missing invoices, but it would also take care of our storage issue," said Michael Hill, Director of Accounts Payable at AETN.

After an extensive search, AETN narrowed the choice down to three AP automation solutions in order to conduct a more detailed evaluation. "We looked at all the features and selected ASPEN 360 Accounts Payable Edition because it stood out from the pack. ASPEN 360 provides us with superior functionality to make the accounts payable process more efficient. In addition, the solution includes top-level support and redundancy capabilities that made this an easy decision," Hill added.

Prior to implementing ASPEN 360, AETN's processors needed to know who could "sign off" on an invoice in each department as well as what spending level they were authorized to approve. ASPEN 360's SmartRouting now streamlines the movement of the invoices through the approval process, knowing where they need to go next, even when users do not know themselves. In addition, ASPEN 360 maintains the approval limits for each person. When an invoice exceeds a user’s approval limits, it is automatically routed to the appropriate person.

ASPEN 360 also eliminates the need for AETN to store the paper invoices. Vendors now submit invoices directly to ASPEN 360's Invoice Virtualization Center (IVC) where Archive Systems receives and converts them to electronic format. Converted invoices are routed by ASPEN 360 automatically using AETN's business rules. Fully approved invoices are transmitted to the ERP system for payment.

AETN currently processes approximately 5,000 invoices per month with ASPEN 360. "The online invoice processing and automated monitoring/enforcement of our approval limits have made the procedure much easier. In many cases, it may only take a few minutes to process an invoice. But the big payback comes from being able to process more invoices with less resources," added Hill.

Because ASPEN 360 is a Software-as-a-Service solution, AETN didn't have to purchase, install, or maintain additional software or hardware. It provides them with an online view of invoices throughout the review, approval and payment process.

"Lost invoices plus the yearly storage of previous year payments and fees are now in the past. Instead of having to search through our file cabinets for an invoice, we can immediately pull it up in ASPEN 360," said Hill.