“When DHL decided to review its paper payments processing system it found Solchar’s Transaction Journal offered the perfect solution.”
“In addition to maximising efficiency and productivity, Transaction Journal provides DHL with greater financial control and a strong audit trail for improved security.”
Verity Bingham
DHL
DHL
DHL is part of the world’s leading logistics group, Deutsche Post DHL, offering integrated services and tailored, customer-focused solutions for managing and transporting letters, goods and information.
In 2005, DHL centralised the internal services which support the entire group, including finance operations, IT and procurement. This consolidation enabled DHL to increase the flexibility of its business, improve service quality and leverage economies of scale and cost benefits.
Jump forward to 2008 and DHL undertook a review of its paper payments processing to ensure cheques and remittances were processed as efficiently as possible. As part of this review, DHL consulted Solchar, a specialist technology company that provides a range of cost-saving solutions to automate cheque, remittance and voucher processing.
Solchar was able to provide DHL with the perfect solution. It recommended Transaction Journal 3 (TJ-3) as means of coping with the huge volumes of paper payments it processed daily, while allowing significant savings in both time and money.
Greater financial control
TJ-3 is a versatile corporate cheque and remittance processing system which can be scaled from one to many users, networked (either wide area or LAN) and tailored to consolidate payment data.
The system automatically stores an image and captures printed and written information from cheques, vouchers, postal orders, BGCs and other credits using a predesignated workflow that provides configurable data input, verification, balancing and approvals processing. Image capture can take place from the front and rear of items and security endorsement printing can be programmed to take place during the scanning process.
The new system comprised two A4 scanners forremittance advices and two cheque scanners for processing the cheques and bank giro slips sent in by customers. Having captured the images, DHL is able to run an extract which is then easily uploaded into the company’s payment allocation system.
Verity Bingham, project manager at DHL, says: “In addition to maximising efficiency and productivity, TJ-3 provides DHL with greater financial control and a strong audit trail for improved security. It has also allowed for better management of record-keeping and compliance, and has helped improve customer service with transaction details easily accessible in the event of queries.”
Tailored to specific requirements
TJ-3 will synchronise and interpret data received via a number of advanced recognition technologies. It interprets information received via printed magnetic image character recognition (MICR), optical character recognition technology (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR-LAR), resulting in an exceptionally high degree of accuracy for both printed and handwritten text.
Where additional data is required which is not present on processed items, this can be extracted from any number of different sources to completely automate the identification and allocation of payments against the correct bank account or client account designation.
One of the main strengths of Transaction Journal is its ability to be tailored to an organisation’s specific requirements with the ability to activate functions from a standard modular core, as and when they are needed. There’s the option of using Solchar’s Transaction Finder utility, for example, which provides even more detailed search and scrutiny functionality. Transaction Finder is a high performance enquiry tool with the ability to retrieve information in seconds which previously could have taken days.
The information is held on a proven SQL database structure, with the images immediately available for review, printing or e-mailing, to branches or customers for example.
“In addition to maximising efficiency and productivity, Transaction Journal provides DHL with greater financial control and a strong audit trail for improved security.”
Verity Bingham
DHL
DHL
The best solution possible
Using Transaction Manager, companies are able to coordinate data and images to provide simultaneous access, processing and reporting. It manages the storage and retrieval of both data and image and is often referred to as a payment archive. Designed to work in a networked environment it can also be used on a standalone system, while the architecture allows for a flexible hierarchy of transaction managers that can be tailored to individual requirements.
When a number of capture devices are installed across an organisation Transaction Manager is able to bring all the information together and is designed to work with Solchar’s range of capture systems, based on a standardised store and forward mechanism.
For DHL, the modular nature of Transaction Journal and the ability to add extra functionality to the system when required was one of the key drivers in choosing Solchar’s solution.
“Since implementation, we have been able to upgrade the system on several occasions and just a few months ago it was enhanced further to improve performance,” says Bingham. “We can be confident that whatever enhancements we require and whenever we need to expand the system, Solchar will deliver the best solution and best service possible.”