Clear Channel Streamlines Paper-Intensive Accounts Payable

Software Magazine, April, 2001 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Clear Channel Communications Inc., San Antonio, Texas, a diversified media company with two business segments--broadcasting and outdoor advertising--has been doubling and tripling its size over the last few years through multiple acquisitions. Clear Channel now owns arid operates 1,170 radio stations, 19 television stations, and more than 700,000 outdoor advertising displays. Now employing some 24,000 people, many of them located in remote offices, the company had to deal with its rapid growth by making its business processes more efficient.

Its accounts payable department, for example, used to get flooded by volumes of paper that traveled between corporate and remote offices. To improve its B2B transactions, Clear Channel needed to streamline its paper-intensive process of handling purchase orders, invoices, and vendor contracts, as well as the accompanying transactions.

"We are a very distributed company, and a lot of work is done out in the field," says John Svurec, Clear Channel director of business applications. "A radio station out in the field would make a purchase and then FedEx the bill here to the corporate head office. The accounting department would pay the bill and then send a check back to the radio station or pay the vendor directly. As the company grew, it became very clear that this wasn't a scalable process."

Svurec says he was looking for a tool that not only would solve Clear Channel's paper storage and retrieval issues, but would also automate the process. Clear Channel was looking for a combination of imaging and workflow, he says.

The first off-the-shelf imaging system purchased cut down on FedEx bills because remote locations could scan in documents and images, index them, and send them electronically. But since it did not have a provision for keying in accounting information, Clear Channel built its own imaging system that could accommodate this capability.

"People in the field have a set of accounts they had budgeted and, when they send in bills, they tell us which account they want to be charged against," says Svurec. "When the bills got here, the accounting department could then double-check their entries."

Once the imaging system was in place, it only solved part of the problem because the electronic format of documents still had to be routed from desk to desk. Clear Channel then installed Acorde, collaborative commerce software from Optika Inc., Colorado Springs, Colo.

Acorde provides an enterprise-wide workflow solution. Using Acorde, Clear Channel can graphically design and manage work processes, thereby enabling efficient management of invoices, purchase orders, and vendor contracts. Although Acorde has an imaging component, Clear Channel is not using it.

"We do all of the data cleaning up within the Acorde workflow system, and then we simply import the data directly into our accounting system," says Svurec. "Because much of the work that would have to be done in the accounting system is being done inside Acorde, we didn't have to upgrade our accounting system, which was actually designed for a much smaller company."