Arriva Bus
Multiple Operating Companies, Multiple Locations, Instant Access to Financial Documentation
Arriva Group PLC is one of the largest transport services organizations in Europe, with over 40,000 employees and more than one billion passenger journeys per year, including both bus and train companies in the United Kingdom. Arriva’s UK bus division operates across Great Britain, including West Scotland, the Northeast, Yorkshire, the Northwest, Wales, the Midlands, the Shires and Essex, as well as in London and across the Southern Counties.
For the bus companies each location runs as a separate operating company within Arriva Group, with regional offices located across the country depending on where the services are offered. However, when considering a document management and scanning solution for their Accounting departments, it was important to Arriva senior managers and IT staff that the long-term management of these important corporate records be centralized on local servers managed in the Sunderland location.
Additionally, Arriva’s goal was to tightly integrate the invoice capture process with the data entry into their Oracle Financials accounting application, so that both processes could be performed in conjunction with each other without significantly increasing labor or doubling the amount of data entry work required.
KCL worked with Arriva and their Oracle provider to tightly integrate the scanning and retrieval software directly into the Oracle Invoice Workbench screen, and then implemented the solution in a distributed capture environment. Now, each location can scan their operating company’s invoices locally from within Oracle, passing along relevant index information from Oracle. The documents are transmitted automatically to the centralized servers in Sunderland where they can be accessed across the enterprise from links within the Oracle system.
Arriva’s Accounts Department users rarely interact directly with the document management system at all. Instead, they live and breathe in their line-of-business application, Oracle Financials, and access crucial records from there at the touch of a button. This is a perfect example of document management “in the background” - there when you need it, non-intrusive when you don’t.