Flying High Using Digital Processes
Aviation giant Mercury Air Group integrated DocuWare with two of its accounting systems, creating a mission critical solution for accounting information and documentation. The company reduced billing time by 6 days, increased cash flow, and gained workflow processing efficiencies.
Privately held, Los Angeles-based Mercury Air Group provides jet fuel, air cargo services and transportation, as well as support services for international and U.S. commercial airlines, general aviation and the U.S. government.
MercFuel, a division of Mercury Air, provides fuel services for planes and airport gas stations known as FBOs by purchasing and reselling over 400 million gallons of jet fuel annually. With a network of over 1,000 third-party fuel suppliers MercFuel needed to move to a digital system in order to better process over 12,000 invoices a month.
Requirements
In the aviation industry, MercFuel is considered a contract fuel provider and is able to leverage its buying power to provide its customers with better fuel pricing at more than 2,000 airports all over the world.
Accounting transactions can become very complex in the aviation industry because one fuel ticket may turn into multiple payable and receivable invoices between various vendors acting in different capacities. MercFuel may get an invoice from one vendor, but not from another before it needs to invoice its own customers. One challenge was to implement a system flexible enough to centrally store all types of documents received at all different times during a billing cycle, as well as be able to integrate with Merc’s accounting software, MAS 500 and their in-house Fuel Sales Processing software named Solar.
Solution
After evaluating over 10 different document management programs, Mercury choose to implement DocuWare because of its workflow capabilities, flexibility, and ability to integrate with other systems the company considers vital. They worked with Authorized DocuWare Partner, eGennaker, to implement the solution.
Fueling transaction details such as location, number of gallons and date, electronically flow from airport gas stations directly into the company’s accounting program through Solar. Solar vastly improves the fuel transaction data collection process, providing quick, easy, and accurate invoicing. To help the accounting team answer questions about these invoices, the data is also electronically printed to PDF and automatically stored in DocuWare, acting as a document backup to what was purely electronic information.
Other payable invoices are scanned when received and the index terms are automatically “read” from the document using Optical Character Recognition from third-party software vendor ABBYY
DocuWare and MAS 500 are tightly integrated. Information like payment document numbers, vendor names and status are pulled directly out of the accounting system and automatically added as index fields to the appropriate documents in DocuWare, Updates made in MAS 500 are automatically reflected in the DocuWare index fields, keeping the systems in sync. Mercury’s DocuWare solution quickly expanded to the Human Resource Department where valuable personnel files were digitized, indexed and stored in DocuWare.
Benefits
With DocuWare in place and supporting documentation available within seconds, MercFuel is now able to bill their customers 6 days faster, increasing cash flow. Regardless if an invoice is a receivable or payable or if it originated in the California, Nevada or Texas office, any staff member can look up the status in seconds due to the transparent nature of DocuWare. Today, accounts payable invoices are approved utilizing DocuWare’s electronic stamp feature, ensuring nothing is lost or delayed. With hundreds of users in multiple locations, the system became crucial to the staff after just two weeks of use because of the new efficiencies in document retrieval and approval processes.
“We integrated DocuWare with our existing accounting systems. The integrated solution mimics our physical workflows and has made keeping up with our growing accounting workload much easier. Utilizing a digital solution that is flexible and customizable allows us to continue to find more efficiencies. It just makes sense,” said Rob Lovejoy, Chief Information Officer at Mercury Air Group.
Due to the complexities of the aviation fuel business, the company was printing and storing 3-4 copies of each invoice. Today, with DocuWare in place, the company has eliminated 12 cases of paper a month in unnecessary printing and repurposed 2,500 square feet of storage space into office space.
Conclusion
Two weeks after implementation, DocuWare became a mission critical system for MercFuel. DocuWare has expanded from their Los Angeles location to Houston and Atlanta and has also expanded into 6 other divisions. It is a key part of Mercury’s IT infrastructure.
“DocuWare scalability really works well for us. With the efficiencies we’ve gained we can do a lot more work without more human resources,” said Lovejoy.
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The Tasks
Streamline approval processes
Integrate the accounting program with accounting records
Eliminate unnecessary copies of information
Create one central archive for all documents
The Benefits
Reduced time to bill by 6 days, improved cash flow
Created electronic approval process
Gained new efficiencies with regard to accessing information
Reduced costs
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