Electronic Workflow Success Story

Well known fitness and wellness resort adopts DocuWare electronic workflow to streamline accounting processes from three locations. Transparent work processes empower staff and give management useful tools to increase efficiency.

Initial Situation and Requirements

The Biggest Loser Resorts, the exclusive resort licensee of NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products and Reveille, LLC, are award-winning, fitness and wellness destinations that offer a results-oriented, calorie-controlled program structured to make getting healthy simple and achievable. Their mission is to provide their guests with a memorable, life-changing experience through fitness, nutrition, education, relaxation and camaraderie. Today, The Biggest Loser Resorts operate in Ivins, Utah, Malibu, California and Niagara/Buffalo, New York.

In keeping with the Resort’s philosophy of developing a healthy lifestyle for each of its guests, they also wanted to adopt environmentally healthy business practices, as well as improve their workflow and strengthen their document retention compliance.

The Biggest Loser Resort decided to implement DocuWare as their electronic document management system to address not only their organizational needs but to secure archiving as well.

Solution

To help The Biggest Loser Resort move to a digital work process, an Authorized DocuWare Partner installed three Fujitsu 6120 scanners and rolled out DocuWare to165 employees in eight departments. The Accounts Payable process was the first to benefit from electronic workflow. Purchases are made by each department; when invoices arrive they are scanned and routed to the department head for approval. Using electronic stamps, invoices can be approved or declined and comments can be added without permanently altering the original document.

The Human Resources department is using DocuWare to store sensitive documents which have a long term retention time. This eliminates boxes and cabinets of documents, strengthening document retention compliance and lowering potential legal liability.  Additionally, the sharing of information between departments is faster and easier thanks to DocuWare.

Benefits and Conclusion

The Biggest Loser Resorts discovered that DocuWare simplified their document retrieval and made processing forms easy, while offering management a transparent system with checks and balances.  DocuWare’s security and access features make compliance with IRS regulations and GAAP (generally accepted accounting practices) much simpler. External audits are easier to manage now that auditors are given electronic access to information. A partner of The Biggest Loser Resort, Cameron Kelsch, said “Installing DocuWare has been great for our business.”

Customer service in Accounting has improved now that the department is able to use an electronic workflow to automatically move invoices through the approval process. Employees working remotely can log into DocuWare and approve invoices from the road, resulting in fewer bottlenecks while at the same time providing the AP department the ability to take advantage of early payment discounts.

“With the Malibu resort opening up in 2010 and Niagara in 2012, being able to easily approve invoices across three locations and keep our Accounts Payable processes running smoothly was crucial. As we’ve grown, our business model has evolved and our processes needed to change as well. With DocuWare we have been able to update our processes and position ourselves for increased future growth.” said Lance Bunnell, CFO for the Biggest Loser Resorts.

Contact Information

Kathy Muessig