[Case Study] Alimera Sciences

Business Overview

Alimera Sciences is a pharmaceutical company that specializes in the research, development, and commercialization of prescription ophthalmic pharmaceuticals, focusing on diseases affecting the back of the eye or retina.

With an international team and lengthy manual processes in place, Alimera knew they needed to implement an automated accounts payable solution to optimize the transparency and efficiency of their financial back office.

The Challenges

Alimera’s accounting team faced two main challenges:

#1: At the time, their accounting platform had limited licenses, which limited productivity. Anyone who wanted to create a purchase order, for instance, had to have a license to login to the platform, delaying the process before it even began.

#2: In their workflow for processing invoices, they found that an invoice would come in, go to the accounts payable department, be distributed to various parties for approval, and then sit on someone’s desk for two or three months. Alimera wanted to stop pushing paper and gain a better system of tracking those documents as they came into the business.

The Solution

After looking at many different software solutions, Alimera chose DocuPhase based on its flexible, yet customized offerings.

“We selected DocuPhase based on the follow-up that was done after the initial presentation,” said Phil Jones, Executive Director of Finance at Alimera. “When we had questions and got into the more serious details, DocuPhase was willing to look at our business processes and work with us as a partner.”

DocuPhase went live in March of 2016 after a couple of months of testing and system clean up. From that point, it only took about two weeks to fully implement the system.

“[Implementation] was a lot quicker than I thought it would be,” said Jones. “Everyone embraced it immediately, and it’s now such a standard part of our everyday business. I think everyone probably wonders why we didn’t have this before.”

DocuPhase addresses Alimera Sciences’ main challenges in the following ways:

#1: By integrating with Microsoft Dynamics, DocuPhase makes PO generation a breeze. Users can simply sign in to DocuPhase via their web browser and complete a form based on the data that already lives inside of Dynamics. Vendor names and codes automatically populate in DocuPhase’s web forms, so all users have to do is list which items are being purchased and electronically submit the form to the correct contact for approval.

#2: With DocuPhase’s intelligent data capture and workflow automation tools, line item details from invoices are extracted and indexed automatically, removing the low-value, time-consuming task of manual data entry. Once the information is in the system, the assigned user is presented with a task, which includes step-by-step instructions of each step to be completed. All related documents–the invoice, purchase order, and receiving report–are presented to the approver in a virtual binder, so all the approver has to do is click “approve” to route it to the next step in the process. This dramatically reduces the time needed to process an invoice and provides visibility into where a document lies in the business process.

The Results

With DocuPhase’s business process automation solutions, Alimera Sciences has been able to reduce invoice processing times by 93% while providing more visibility into the procure-to-pay (P2P) process, yielding a significant increase in productivity and customer satisfaction.

With their new automated workflow system, tasks are now tracked to provide visibility into where assemblies are in the process; users can track requisitions for parts from the generation process through quoting and receipt, allowing Alimera to tie purchased parts back to original quoted prices; and the accounts payable department can process multiple types of invoices in order to match them against the original purchase.

The amount of time saved was the most surprising benefit of implementing DocuPhase, according to Jones. To process an invoice before using DocuPhase, it could take a week to a couple of months. This was especially true for invoices that needed to be approved by multiple sectors of the business.

Now, most items are done within 24 hours.

Further, prior to DocuPhase, Alimera’s accounting department had two accounts payable clerks. When one employee left the company, Alimera decided to hold off on hiring someone new. What they found is that their current AP clerk was able to regain half a day’s worth of time to complete additional tasks.

With menial tasks being automated by DocuPhase, she was able to successfully manage a workload that previously took two employees by herself.

These time savings didn’t affect the accounting department alone: they affected the business as a whole.

“[Our AP Clerk] has found that the program itself has been somewhat of a God-send in the fact that it’s lessened her workload tremendously,” said Jones. “To have parties coming to me saying, ‘We can do more work’ has given us the ability to complete other tasks that we hadn’t been able to do before. We’re now able to look at other areas and processes and see where we could benefit.”