Set to improve audit, overcharge recovery; potentially recover millions in overbillings
Pleasanton, CA — June 30, 2004 — Xign Corp., a provider of enterprise order-to-pay (EOP) software and services, today announced an invoice processing and audit service to simplify electronic data interchange (EDI) file mapping and maintenance and recover money from overbillings.
Additionally, the provider said that retailer Payless ShoeSource, which sells more than 200 million pairs of shoes annually, is moving all of its EDI-enabled suppliers to the Xign Payment Services Network to take advantage of this new feature with the hope of potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars from overbillings in the first year alone.
Xign's order-to-pay service, the Xign Payment Services Network (XPSN), is designed to streamline the processes of order delivery, invoicing and payment. It also monetizes early payment discounts across corporate spend. With it, Xign claimed that organizations can reduce order-to-pay processing costs and cycle times, accelerate early payment discount capture, and strengthen supplier relationships.
EDI allows trading partners to exchange electronic documents such as purchase orders and invoices for processing. Xign said that many large organizations do some EDI transactions with suppliers, but in most cases EDI is restricted to a small number of high-volume suppliers. The difficulty of mapping and maintaining EDI files and activating suppliers, as well as the value-added network (VAN) transmission fees, has limited the use of EDI within organizations, according to Xign.
However, Payless ShoeSource said that with the advanced file mapping and map maintenance technologies from Xign it now can more efficiently implement and maintain EDI maps than it historically had done.
For telecommunications and utility vendors that Payless prefers to pay immediately and audit later, the new Xign order-to-pay service captures detailed billing information and creates a separate analysis file that Payless uses to detect overbillings. In addition, EDI file maps in the Xign library are reusable, thereby extending the benefits of file mapping across the network.
Some of the functionality of the XPSN for telecommunications and utility invoice processing and auditing includes customized supplier EDI mapping, automated invoice coding, AP data capture and posting, non-AP data capture, and telecom and utility bill analysis.
"Potential savings from this new Xign service can be substantial," said Vic Nation, Payless manager of accounts payable/receivable. "It replaces a time consuming, labor intensive process with an efficient system for detecting telecom and utility overcharges."
Nation added that another benefit comes from the ability of the Xign service to encode all EDI invoices based on Payless ShoeSource's business rules, saving the retailer from having to manually key and code thousands of invoice lines each month.
Mark Worsey, Xign vice president of client services, added, "Because different Xign customers often have common telecom and utility vendors, each customer benefits from the other customer's mapped suppliers. When a supplier's file format changes, Xign can update that format for multiple customers simultaneously."
