Reuters, a news and financial information and services provider with 198 offices in 150 countries, is on the cutting edge of the information world, providing its customers with up-to-the-minute data on more than 40,000 companies worldwide. Unfortunately, its old paper-based process for handling invoices wasn’t nearly as efficient.

Until recently, Reuters used a cumbersome, paper-based system to get approvals and pay its nearly 350,000 invoices generated annually. Since the system was manual, invoices sometimes were routed to the wrong manager, resulting in late payments, and in certain countries, fines.

“We spent a lot of time and effort chasing invoices around to get them approved from pieces of paper,” said Barry Donovan, head of sourcing at Reuters.

But then the company implemented 170 Systems’ Markview document management system, which quickly satisfied two key criteria: Web and Oracle support.

Now, when a Reuters manager is notified via e-mail that something requires attention, he or she simply clicks on an attachment and logs into the Markview application. Approvals then are just a matter of dragging, dropping and clicking – and it’s done.

Because it’s Web-enabled, Reuters managers all over the world have easy access, and since its tied in so tightly with the firm’s Oracle applications, it lets users handle invoices locally, while ensuring that all invoices are processed uniformly, stored wisely and accessed efficiently.