Drinks firm Nichols uses document management to save cash and carbon

£100,000 and 162 tonnes of carbon a year

Soft drinks group Nichols, known in the UK for its Vimto, Sunkist and Panda brands, reckons it is saving £100,000 a year using a document management system from Version One in its central finance department.

The company has now installed Version One’s ‘green meter’ which uses formulae from, among others, the Carbon Trust and has found that as well as the monetary saving, it is eliminating 162 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 631,055 sheets of paper per annum.

“At Nichols, we recognise that every one of us has a responsibility to the environment,” says Allan Doyle, IT manager at Nichols. “This is why it’s important to be able to explain to staff how their actions may or may not be directly impacting carbon emissions.”

Nichols will be posting green meter calculations to its intranet to show employees how their actions have a direct impact on the environment.

The green meter calculates CO2, paper and tree savings relating to: distribution of documents by email or fax, versus printing and posting; automated storage, versus printing and filing; and electronic document authorisation, versus photocopying and circulating the document.

Version One’s document management and imaging solutions removed the administration overheads of processing, photocopying, enveloping, posting and manually filing every document. With 20,000 sales invoices being produced every month just for soft drinks vending company, Cabana.

Nichols implemented the document management system into its Sage Line 500 accounting software, enabling the creation, delivery, storage, retrieval and authorisation of the whole group’s financial documents directly from Sage. Nichols electronically archives all incoming and outgoing financial documents including purchase orders, invoices, remittance advices, statements, contracts and payslips. Electronic authorisation of invoices runs over Nichols’ WAN; previously invoices were posted for approval.

Indeed, the software has enabled Nichols to consolidate individual financial departments at six operating companies across the UK into a centralised financial department.

“A central finance department would have been totally unworkable,” says Doyle. “Each operating company’s financial department had up to twelve storage cabinets full of documents. By electronically archiving all documents, physical storage has been eliminated, making the move to centralised finance possible. Version One’s technology also solved the problem of how to get invoices approved quickly and easily when approvers are scattered all over the country.”

Up to 70 per cent of accounts staff time has been redeployed into more valuable activities, added Doyle.