It takes more than chips to make chips

Today, Feb 2001

What is true for computer hardware also applies to snack foods. The financial operations that support Frito-Lay's distribution of more than 9 billion bags of snacks a year required new ingredients for the 21st Century.

Frito-Lay Corporation has recently made some major changes in their financial operations. The driving force behind these changes was the need to migrate from non-Y2K compliant mainframe systems. But Frito management also saw the opportunity to bring their fragmented financial processes together. In a phased rollout, Oracle Financials (www.oracle.com/650-506-7000) was chosen, on the recommendation of Highland Technologies (www.htech.com), both for its robustness in handling Frito's long-term large-scale and multi-functional requirements, and as the logical complement to Frito's migration to other Oracle components.

"Our sister company PepsiCo decided to implement a new financial software package," said Jignesh Patel, Imaging Manager at Frito-Lay. "We had a homegrown mainframe and went with Oracle Financials. I have no doubt that Oracle provides the strongest database engines on the market."

Confidence in choosing a vendor to integrate Financials with Document Imaging was enhanced by Frito's experience with Highland Technologies, which had previously image-enabled Frito's proof of delivery process.

"We wanted to ensure that Frito's document management and document imaging were integrated," said Patel. "For the proof of delivery system, we knew that the database would have to be extremely robust, as it services upwards of 1,500 transactions a minute. We were considering an SQL Server, but Highland's people told us that Oracle would be much better for these very heavy demands."

Patel explained that his imaging center shares services with Frito's sister companies within PepsiCo. The combined companies can send as many as 230,000 paper invoices daily through his shop. These invoices come from all across the US, and are scanned in through HighView, Highland's document imaging product, into Oracle Payable. Invoices from over 9,000 vendors are received for processing at the Frito-Lay headquarters in Plano, Texas. These invoices are prepared for scanning, then batch-processed through Fujitsu and Kodak high-speed scanners. A batch splitter breaks batches into individual documents and HighView assigns each an identification number before they are automatically forwarded to the appropriate processor's work queue.

Efficiency Improvements Give Remote Users a View

The sooner an invoice has been scanned, the quicker it can be viewed by any department with a need to access it.

"My guarantee is six hours from receipt of an invoice until it's into the system," Patel boasted.

Infrastructure invoices such as utility and telephone bills are sent directly to Frito's invoicing department. However, most bills must be pre-approved by individual cost centers before being processed.

Patel anticipates greater functionality once Frito integrates more captured accounting data into its data mining system. "There's a great opportunity for slicing 20 different ways," he said. "We can use that data to negotiate contracts or detect payment patterns."

"Our work with Oracle products at Frito-Lay demonstrates the mutual rewards that flow from an ideal partnership," said Mark Neiff, Highland's sales manager. "HighView's imaging capabilities and ease of use got us our first job for Frito. Our engineers' confidence that Oracle 7 was right for Frito's volume demands sold the database."

While less demanding on the database, running Oracle Financials at every stage of all financial operations is projected to involve 150 seats at completion. The first phase was a successful update of Frito's ten-- employee payables system for capital expenditures.

Indexing data for the scanned document images resides on its own Oracle 7.3.3 database. Automatic data exchange between databases ensures that images can be searched by index fields, and that the appropriate Financials form is associated with correct image via a shared HighView ID.

Should the bill raise issues requiring further attention, HighView provides automated routes to rescanning (if the document image is flawed), vendor maintenance (if the vendor is not recognized by Financials), and such external review areas as Marketing, Engineering, and R&D. Each image has an associated notes field where the processor can describe the action required, as well as an array of image mark-up tools, to draw attention to the specific problem with the bill. Once the issue has been addressed, the document automatically returns to the top of the originating processor's document queue.

Asked to advise a department just instigating document imaging, Patel says, "Get 100% user buy in; then get 110% user training. You can put a $10 million system in place that's unbreakable and they'll find a way."