Nichols drinks to cost savings

The manufacturer of popular drink brands Vimto, Panda and Sunkist is saving more than £100,000 a year by moving its financial operations to a shared services centre.

Nichols replaced the financial departments at six different operating companies across the UK with one centre using electronic document management software.

The decision was made as part of an ongoing restructure at the company, which had also resulted in the centralising of all IT functions.

IT manager Allan Doyle said: ‘Each company had their own finance department and staff. Each department also had up to 12 storage cabinets fill of documents and a shared services office simply could not accommodate all these.

‘By electronically archiving all documents, the physical storage space required has been eliminated, making the move to shared services possible.’

The implementation of document management software has also removed the administration overheads of processing, photocopying, enveloping, posting and manually filing every document.

‘Authorisation of invoices previously had to mailed to an office and signed by the author, but now it can be scanned into the system and authorised,’ Doyle said.

‘With 20,000 sales invoices being produced every month just for soft drinks vending company, Cabana, the cost and efficiency savings are considerable.’

He says there is a reduction in the paper flow, reduced storage needs and greater security as everything is back up off-site.

Nichols implemented Version One software into its Sage Line 500 system, enabling shared services to create, deliver, store, retrieve and authorise all financial documents directly from Sage.

It electronically archives all incoming and outgoing financial documents including purchase orders, invoices, remittance advices, statements, contracts and payslips.

Doyle added: ‘Staff time is now much better utilised as they no longer needs to hunt around in filing cabinets and cardboard boxes for financial documents, make multiple copies of documents and then manually process each and every one of them.

‘We have redeployed up to 70 per cent of the accounts staff’s time on value added activities.’

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