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American Gypsum"By enhancing visibility into the invoice discrepancy and job quoting process, we are able to realize revenue more quickly, reduce excess inventory and improve the bottom line."

Chad Childre, Business Systems Manager, American Gypsum

American Gypsum Company is the nation's fifth-largest wallboard producer and a subsidiary of Eagle Materials, Inc. (NYSE:EXP). American Gypsum manufacturing facilities in Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma produce and supply nearly three billion square feet of gypsum wallboard each year. Gypsum wallboard is used to build and renovate residential, commercial, and industrial structures.

Challenge

The success of American Gypsum is due in part to their ability to produce enough high quality products to satisfy customer market demand and price these goods accurately in the face of constantly changing market conditions. The rapid growth of the company has driven the effort to automate several manual processes to ensure continued success.

American Gypsum ships approximately 10.8 million square feet of product a day and generates hundreds of invoices each day. Due to changes in market conditions, many changes and adjustments must be made to these invoices. The current manual processes used at American Gypsum were not efficient enough to track and resolve these issues in a timely manor and meet the strict customer satisfaction initiatives American Gypsum is famous for providing.

Each invoice discrepancy had to be thoroughly investigated and resolved by members of American Gypsum's accounts receivable and customer service departments. Notes, comments, and documents were exchanged during the research phase via several electronic and physical methods. This lengthened the resolution cycle and became a hindrance to efficiency.

Approach

American Gypsum began using Nsite business applications in May 2005. Nsite offers a simple and fast way to drive requests, approvals, and decision-making processes throughout the organization in an automated fashion.

American Gypsum employees are able to launch a process quickly, by selecting the process application, indicating who should be included in the routing path, and clicking the "Submit" button. Participants are alerted to review requests via email and can securely access the routing from any web browser and any location. Documents may be attached to any routing, all activities are time-stamped, and the routing path and status are visible to registered users in real time.

The flexibility of the Nsite system enables American Gypsum to adapt routings each time a process is initiated. The same type of routing can be sent through different users based on the bidding process. This is accomplished with the use of the Nsite Predictive Routing Engine. The Predictive Routing Engine "remembers" who needs to view and respond to routes depending on content in the process itself.

Results

By migrating a multi-system manual review process to a single automated solution, American Gypsum has reduced its payment cycle time by more than 50 percent. A centralized, automated system also allows for a more predictable receivables timetable, process tracking, and documentation of each resolution.

American Gypsum also identified additional opportunities for Nsite to provide process improvements in other areas of the company once the Nsite solution was in place. In sales operations, Nsite was able to automate the quoting process for tracking processes which occur between salespeople, customer service representatives, and management. Nsite allows a quote to be created, approved, and automatically imported directly into the existing ERP system. This integration provides increased tracking, increased efficiency, and better reporting capabilities.

"Beyond the operational and business savings, we have received positive feedback from the day-to-day users on the simplicity and reliability of our new short pay review and quoting process with Nsite," stated Brad Shepherd, Business Systems Analyst at American Gypsum.

"By enhancing visibility into the invoice discrepancy and job quoting process, we are able to realize revenue more quickly, reduce excess inventory and improve the bottom line," said Chad Childre, Business Systems Manager at American Gypsum. "As an organization, the decision to automate caused us to sit down and analyze our business processes more carefully. This exercise helped raise the level of awareness for sales and service activities across the company."

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