The National Grid

“The team has exceeded its own targets of processing all work within three days, as all invoices received are now processed within 24 hours”.

The Company
National Grid Transco plc is an international energy delivery business, whose principal activities are in the regulated electricity and gas industries. They are the largest
investor-owned utility in the UK, where they own and operate the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales, as well as Britain's natural gas transportation system.

They are one of the top ten electricity companies in the US, with the largest electricity transmission and distribution network in the New England/New York region - and also operate a gas distribution network in New York. Other electricity interests include inter-connectors in the UK, US and Australia, and joint-venture transmission networks in Argentina and Zambia.

They have also have transferred their network skills to other markets with interests that include wholly-owned infrastructure and energy-related businesses in the UK and US.

The Problem
The greatest challenge facing a privatised national utility such as the National Grid is how to increase profits through efficiency gains. Technology holds the answer - and has allowed the National Grid to automate much of its transmission network, slash the number of control centres across the nation and virtually eliminate the need to man substations.

The manager of the accounts team at the National Grid saw potential for savings by eliminating the paper from the 50,000+ invoices that are processed for payment every year.

Keeping the paperwork of old invoices was proving costly and troublesome, it was hard to find things - and once they had been moved off-site, it could take a day or more to track them down.

So, when embarking on the e-docs project, the National Grid had two clear targets in sight:

• To use their computer systems more effectively to store documents online so that they could be recalled instantaneously.
  
  
• As signatories to the CBI Code of Best Practice in Payments to creditors, they wanted a system that would track every supplier’s invoice from the moment of its arrival to its due date for payment, whilst also allowing their staff to turn the work around virtually immediately.

The Result
After installing the e-docs document imaging system and scanner - and customising it to meet their needs, the accounts department were able to achieve both targets.

Each mornings’ batch of invoices were scanned into e-docs, taking a member of the team around an hour as some have many pages, both single and double sided. Each invoice could then be called up on screen and the Oracle purchase ledger posted as normal. By integrating the two applications, the e-docs databases were automatically updated with the relevant document information and at this point the invoice could be matched with the purchase requisition and the delivery note.

Once an invoice had been "matched" it was ready for approval - and here another vital feature of the system was revealed. Whoever requested the goods or services could see a clear and faithful electronic image of the invoice on their PC. Regardless of where in the country the approving manager was, once the image was posted onto the system it became available immediately, with no risk of the document getting lost in transit or buried in the bottom of someone’s ‘pending’ tray. And after scanning there was no need, or even a legal requirement to keep the invoices, so after a few months they could be shredded.

The Manager of the Creditors Department at the National Grid commented: “An immediate benefit is the complete traceability of the system. Historically we have always been blamed when people do not get paid on time, but with e-docs we can channel that blame to the relevant people and achieve this successfully - because everything has dates and times attached to it with clearly documented audit trails. The team has exceeded its own targets of processing all work within three days, as all invoices received are now processed within 24 hours”.

Using e-docs, the National Grid have also built a Query Control system which allows them to log and track all queries from creditors. So when a large supplier contacted them five times over the same BACS payment - each time with a different person phoning in - they were able to tell the supplier about the payment and provide a full history of every contact that had taken place between the National Grid and the suppliers’ organisation.

They are now working on ways to improve the tracking of payments and as there is plenty of capacity on the scanner to cope with other work, they hope soon to start processing expense claims in this way as well.