Barnes & Noble College (BNCB) operates 770 campus bookstores nationwide for top academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and Georgia Tech. BNCB serves over 5.3 million students and faculty, delivering “what’s next” in campus retail and digital learning experience.
At Barnes & Noble College, the company is more than just a bookstore operator. They are a trusted and valued partner to the schools they serve, transcending the role of the traditional campus store by delivering an unmatched digital education experience.
THE CHALLENGE
Barnes & Noble College had a decentralized and manual Accounts Payable (AP) process at their stores for General Merchandise (GM) wherein the details of the invoices had to be entered manually into the database. This effort required at least 1-2 personnel per store on a part-time basis to capture invoice details. As the volume of the invoices increased, the scope for human error and data inaccuracy also increased. Over time, it became a tedious, time-consuming and inefficient process.
THE SOLUTION
OSI built a JEE based custom Optical Character Reading (OCR) solution for transcribing invoices for downstream AP processing. The OCR solution automated the task of data transcription by systematically reading the PDF invoice files and capturing the data from these invoices into a CSV file that can be processed by the new merchandise payables system.
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THE RESULT
BNCB selected OSI Digital to seamlessly integrate its existing retail merchandising system with business applications across its financial business functions
- Accounts payable automation
- Invoice attachment, transcription and data entry integration with IBM B2BI EDI service
- Processes hard copies or scanned image attachments
- Streamlines invoice process and eliminates transcription error
- Mass uploads using FTP/File system
- Parallel processing of invoices
- Metrics dashboard for OneScan’s scanning performance
