The Client
The Nando’s story began in South Africa in 1987 and the restaurant group, specialising in peri peri chicken, now operates in 26 countries. The first UK Nando’s launched in 1992 in Ealing and there are approx 230 UK restaurants, 50 of them in London. Nandos’ food is Portuguese/ Mozambiquan in influence and all chickens are delivered fresh to restaurants from UK farms. Nando’s describes its offer as casual dining rather than fast food. With main offices in the capital, all of the Nando’s UK’s restaurants are company owned.
Recently Nando’s was voted Sunday Times Best Big Company to work for in 2010. They debuted in the Sunday Times’ annual list of the 25 best big Companies to work for, in the first position. Achieving the best overall score for Wellbeing (70%), My Manager (76%) and My Team (79%).
The Need
“Nando’s finance department was looking for a document scanning solution to facilitate sharing and authorisation of invoices across the company, without putting the burden of extra work on the department.” said Gregory.
Around 400 people would need access to the documents electronically, including over 230 restaurant managers, 30 area managers and every department of the support departments. Different access privileges would need to be set for each individual, with finance having top level access and document originators, area managers etc having appropriate privileges.
The busy finance department did not feel it had the capacity to take on the mammoth task of data entry that would be associated with sharing electronically over 3,000 invoices a month. They were hoping for an outsourced solution.
The Solution
The Nando’s IT team considered both Intelefile and KnowledgeLake solutions to integrate to their enterprise Microsoft SharePoint ECM and was won over by Intelefile because it offered an overnight outsourced data entry and indexing service.
“Intelefile has a very appealing offer,” said Abraham Atshaba, Development Manager, at Transputec. “It allows users to scan hardcopy documents, transmit them to our indexing service overnight and be able to search access and share the documents online the following day on a secured hosted environment. Intelefile can also allow integration with your own content management system such as SharePoint.”
Gregory Sigaud, Development Manager, Nando’s, said: “Our finance department felt that scanning invoices was going to be a far less time intensive process than entering and indexing the data for themselves.”
So the Nando’s IT department worked with Transputec to integrate Intelefile into the SharePoint environment they were already running. “We have only taken part of the solution and have modified it for our needs,” explained Gregory “Intelefile’s functionality gave us the ability to incorporate the elements we wanted into our own systems”.
The company is introducing Intelefile in a phased programme to the finance department to control and manage the change programme successfully.Gregory said: “We are currently only scanning selected supplier invoices for restaurant repairs and maintenance, which is running to around 500-700 documents a month.
“Phase two will see us including repairs and maintenance invoices across the whole company and phase three will bring the addition of contract and rental invoices as well as utility bills. By the end of the year, we will be scanning 3-4,000 invoices a month.
“Each invoice type requires different metadata capture to ensure full searchability, so we are operating on a phased approach to cause minimum disruption to both IT and finance departments.”
The Benefit
Outsourced data entry and indexing makes Intelefile a very time efficient document scanning solution for Nando’s.Gregory said: “Without this part of the solution, our purchase ledger staff would soon become bogged down with processing upwards of 3,000 invoices a month.
“Once scanned, we are seeing invoices appear in our shared environment within 24-48 hours. If finance had to complete this time- consuming process itself, you can only guess at how many hours it would take each week.”
A major benefit of Intelefile is that invoice approvals have been greatly speeded up. “The workflow management in our SharePoint solution and also the provision of Indexing Service from Intelefile means that approvals are now happening within four days, whereas previously it could take weeks.” said Gregory.
Intelefile’s user friendly interface allows the whole purchase ledger team to be trained up in a very short period of time. Ultimately, four- to-six people have been scanning invoices using a dedicated scanning station.
Transputec recommended a scanner based on Nando’s volume of documents. However, as Intelefile is scanner independent, Nando’s were able to choose a different scanner which worked well with all kinds of paper.
Another benefit, apart from its ease of use, was that hard copy invoices can now quickly be sent to archive, freeing up space in the finance department. “Everyone appreciates there being fewer piles of paper around,” said Gregory.
