Stimson Lumber Builds Up its Back Office Optimization

Upgrades ACOM system with electronic delivery capabilities

Upgrades ACOM system with electronic delivery capabilities

Atlanta — July 21, 2004 — Stimson Lumber Co., a privately held forest products and natural resource company based in Portland, Ore., said it has purchased ACOM Solution's automated fax and e-mail modules to provide electronic delivery capabilities for the EZPayManager/400 payment management and the EZeDocs/400 document output management solutions that it implemented in 2002 and 2003.

James Scott, vice president and general manager of ACOM's iSeries Division, who make the announcement, said the software runs on an IBM iSeries 2406 using data from an N/Compass financial management system from SupportNet.

With its roots dating back to the 1850s, Stimson Lumber is one of the oldest, continuously operating forest products companies in the United States. Today the company maintains three accounts with Bank of America to handle some 19,000 accounts payable checks issued per year on behalf of corporate headquarters, forestry operations involving 450,000 company-owned acres of timberland, and 14 manufacturing facilities located in four states. It needed a way to generate annual accounts payable checks that would not be vulnerable to fraud, and also would not be pre-printed multi-part forms that had to be tractor-fed on impact printers.

ACOM said its EZPayManager/400 is designed to generate checks on MICR-laser printers using stored electronic check templates and blank security check stock. It also supports payment security through the use of ACOM's Check Fraud alert, a positive pay program that intercepts questionable checks and flags them for review.

The companion EZeDocs/400 solution has enabled Stimson Lumber to replace preprinted forms with electronic templates for virtually all of its operating documents, resulting in significant savings on printing, inventory and handling costs as well as producing dramatic increases in efficiency.

"Adding electronic delivery capabilities amplifies on these advantages," said IT Manager Greg Baumgardner. "With automated electronic fax and e-mail, we can transmit documents of all kinds to any fax number or e-mail address in the world directly from the iSeries platform. On the payment side, we will be sending fax or e-mail remittance advice electronically to vendors that are paid via [automated clearing house (ACH)] so they can know in advance precisely when payments will be credited to their accounts.

Baumgardner added that the elimination of mailing and manually faxing hard copies expedites communications with both customers and vendors, benefiting not only Stimson Lumber, but its trading partners as well. "We expect to see a significant reduction in days sales outstanding, for example, and we will be able to elevate our service levels by responding to trading partner queries more quickly," he said.

Stimson Lumber also employs ACOM's EZConnect EDI-XML (electronic data interchange-extensible markup language) solution to exchange documents such as invoices, customer acknowledgements and sales orders directly with certain trading partners in an automated computer-to-computer process.

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