Rack Room Shoes
Company Overview
Rack Room Shoes is an American footwear retailer headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. For over 100 years, their mission is to be a family footwear retailer of choice by consistently providing quality products, great styles, great prices, and a sincere respect and appreciation for the customer. Rack Room Shoes has roughly 4,000 associates working in 420 stores in 33 states, selling top shoe brands like Nike, Adidas, Crocs, and Birkenstock.
Business Challenge
- Too much paper: In 2018, Rack Room Shoes processed approximately 560,000 invoices. Before partnering with DataServ, they had 90% of invoices coming in via EDI. The problem was, the last 10% took half of their full-time employees. Out of the 9 FTE’s on the AP staff, 5 of them were dedicated to handling all the paper from that last 56,000 invoices. Rack Room Shoes has a fairly diverse network of vendors, from small businesses like window washing companies and repair vendors, to large vendors like Nike and FedEx. They had 7 file cabinets stuffed full of invoices, and wanted to figure out a way to reduce that paper footprint.
- Lack of visibility: At any given moment, Rack Room didn’t know what it was obligated to pay, making it very difficult for month-end accruals. Decentralized invoices were a problem. Various departments wanted to own the invoices, but sometimes there was a delay in getting them to accounts payable. The low visibility into the payables process meant AP staff didn’t know whose desk the invoice was on and could not identify bottlenecks in the process.
- Inefficient audits and document retrieval issues: Throughout the year, Rack Room would go through sales tax audits and an annual audit. The most important part of an audit is pulling the invoice, because auditors want to see that everything was being charged appropriately. The AP staff were never sure they could find the invoices that they needed on demand, as invoices were frequently misfiled.
The Solution & Outcome
Before they went live with AP automation, DataServ made sure the Rack Room staff were comfortable and confident working with the system. DataServ did thorough testing and training to ensure the Rack Room team understood how to use the system and understood the whole solution.
The tailored AP solution from DataServ allowed Rack Room Shoes to automatically process more of their invoices, gave them much-needed visibility into their AP process, and made their audits more efficient with easy digital document retrieval.
Their automation transformation provided them with the following valuable benefits:
- Visibility over all invoices via AP automation
- No touch processing for 97% of invoices
- Centralized invoices
- Full-lifecycle document retention management
- Full audit log access, reporting capabilities, and dashboard metrics
- Elimination of onsite and offsite storage of paper
- Reduction of tribal knowledge and controlled chaos, all with no reduction in full-time employees
By digitizing their workflow, Rack Room has been able to reduce their 7 file cabinets of paper invoices down to just 2. The 3% of invoices that are still processed manually consists of travel and confidential invoices that require a little human work before being entered into the DataServ system.
Rack Rooms audits have been streamlined through the automation process, as well. The AP team can now see who did what to a document and when they did it, so they can identify gaps in their process. They can also give auditors direct access to the DataServ platform, so the Rack Room team does not have to provide audit documentation.
Keri Morgan, Accounts Payable Manager at Rack Room Shoes, is thrilled with the results they have seen working with DataServ and she knows that DataServ will continue to support her team as their company grows. “DataServ worked with us to make sure our needs were met. We are still working with DataServ to tweak things here and there to improve our process. Partnership is key.”
DataServ has many other Client success stories in the form of additional case studies and testimonials. A short phone call or quick email is all it takes to find out more. Call us today at 877-700-DATA (3282), email us at info@DataServ.com or visit us at www.DataServ.com to get started.
“DataServ worked with us to make sure our needs were met. We are still working with DataServ to tweak things here and there to improve our process. Partnership is key.”
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