Solutions Integration, Document Management

The Client

The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) provides high-quality merchandise and services at low prices to U.S. military personnel and their families worldwide. With 8.7 million customers and annual revenues of $6.9 billion, AAFES pays thousands of invoices every day.

The Challenge

In 1995, AAFES realized its manual accounting system was obsolete. Accounts payable staff members were sorting, distributing, and reconciling 4,000 invoices a day by hand. The process involved as many as seven separate accounting applications. Management had to deal with a multitude of reports from the separate systems as well as manual end users. For help automating their accounts payable process, AAFES turned to BearingPoint.

The Solution

Over a five-month period, we worked with AAFES to design, develop, and deploy an application that routes invoice images to clerks automatically, expediting indexing and reconciliation. This application lets accounts payable clerks work in real time against the AAFES mainframe-based accounting system. Invoice processing at AAFES today is simpler, timely, cost effective, and more efficient.

The Benefits

With BearingPoint’s help, AAFES now has a system that:

• Encompasses all accounts payable activity with a centralized accounting package.
• Streamlines and reduces the cost of operations, processing 10,000 invoices a day with 20 percent fewer clerks than the old manual system.
• Filters data to deliver critical information quickly, so management can pinpoint vendor, contract, or process problems and take corrective action.
• Reduces demand and costs of paper storage space.
• Results in operations savings of close to $1 million a year.

In fact, because AAFES enhanced its operational efficiencies so significantly with the new system, Bill Gates nominated it for Computerworld’s “Smithsonian Award” in the Government/Non-Profit Organizations category.

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