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Roll Coater rolls out ACOM’s EZPayManager
to support MFG/PRO
THE COMPANY
When Roll Coater, Inc. replaced a 20-year-old Unisys legacy
system with QAD’s MFG/PRO accounting and financial
management software suite and an HP 9000 computer, the
company’s IT personnel discovered that while MFG/PRO
could indeed generate checks on preprinted company check
forms, there was no provision for electronic payments (ACH)
or Positive Pay.
Indianapolis-headquartered Roll Coater provides rolls of
coated sheet metal to the building, appliance, HVAC,
transportation, and furnishings industries. Company policy
at the company, a wholly owned subsidiary of ArvinMeritor,
Inc., requires that nonvalue-add procedures and services,
such as manual activities, be eliminated wherever possible
and replaced by more contemporary methods. For the IT
department, which is in charge of payment management at
Roll Coater, two such activities stood out conspicuously:
Positive Pay, the check fraud intervention system; and the
reimbursement of expenses incurred by company personnel
using the banking industry’s Automated Clearing House
network (ACH).
THE PROBLEM
Historically, these processes have been manual at Roll
Coater. For ACH and Positive Pay files, IT ran a batch
process that required about 15 minutes of mainframe time,
then moved the files to a PC in an FTP file transfer. The
files were transferred to the respective banks through a
communications package, with hard copy remittance
statements printed and distributed manually to each ACH
recipient.
The target date for cutting over to the QAD software was
October 2001, and it was already late July, says Senior
Director of IT David Prince. He had two choices: once again
develop the processes in-house, or find a third-party
solutions vendor. The first alternative was out of the
question: there was neither the time nor the personnel
resources required to create the software.
A QAD implementation specialist noted that a company
business partner, ACOM Solutions, Inc., had recently
announced a comprehensive new payment management
solution called EZPayManager.
THE SOLUTION
EZPayManager is a scalable, modular solution that features a
powerful, integrated payment management engine, with modules
for:
- Printing MICR laser checks
- Sending electronic payments through the ACH network
- Sending remittance advice and advice of deposit
statements via financial EDI (F-EDI), fax, eMail
- Converting payments of remittances into PDF files for
emailing as attachments or secure posting on the web
THE IMPLEMENTATION
In early August, Prince contacted ACOM and learned that he
could obtain EZPayManager with only the ACH and ACOM’s
Positive Pay module – Check Fraud Alert – as well as an
email module for sending the remittance advice to the ACH
payment recipients.
At Roll Coater. “We decided not to implement checks at this
time,” he says. “Currently, the company prefers to use
preprinted checks, which can be generated directly from
MFG/PRO. With two months to go until cutover, there was
too little time to implement everything.”
Prince designated an IT staff member to work with ACOM
on-site to install and verify the system, and to be the
dedicated system operator.
As in other ACOM implementations, the financial
management software generates the payment files, but
where the files usually spool out to EZPayManager for
formatting and check production, at Roll Coater, MFG/PRO
formats the checks and spools the file out to the printer.
EZPayManager then takes over the ACH and Positive Pay
functions.
“Our dedicated user runs the standard accounts payable
register for Positive Pay and ACH in MFG/PRO, saving the
files in text format. EZPayManager is seamlessly integrated
and automatically maps the text files to the respective ACH
and Positive Pay formats. It automatically emails the ACH
remittance statements to the ACH clients, eliminating all
manual paper distributions. What usually took two hours in
the past now happens in seconds. Recipients are delighted
because they receive instant notice of their disbursements.”
The Positive Pay function is similarly automated. Using the
home-made legacy system, it was necessary to create an
application file from the mainframe, format it and manually
transmit it to the bank, which then posted any questionable
checks to the company website. Now, the file imports
directly to EZPayManager from the MFG/PRO register and is
automatically forwarded to the bank with no intermediate
programming or data manipulation required.
SUCCESS
Prince estimates that conservatively, EZPayManager will save
his department at least 50 man-hours per year, not counting
the mainframe cycle times that are saved through MFG/PRO
and EZPayManager.
“The biggest saving of all,” he says, “is that we didn’t have to
devote the time and resources to do this ourselves. That
would have been very expensive, and based on past
experience we judged that it would have taken four months or
more. Currently, all of the payment activities are performed
by the IT department, but as we evaluate check printing in
the future, we see the accounts payable group as users.”
The installation and training went as planned, Prince adds,
noting that whenever issues were presented to ACOM, the
turnaround time on the correction was a matter of hours.
“Everything worked as advertised,” Prince says. “One of the
things that was confirmed in this exercise was that if you lack
the expertise and resources, it’s best to leverage
outsourcing. The concept of remote development can be
difficult for an IT staff to manage, and in this case we were
very pleased with the results, from gathering specifications
through training and implementation.”
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