AcceLIM
An Intricate View of Transactions

The complexity in supply side order management reflects directly in the multitudes and types of entities that record each stage of transacting for goods and services, from quotes and contracts, to invoices, approvals, order confirmations, and receipts. In the case of Fabless semiconductor companies who rely heavily on Subcontractors, frequently authorizing releases of thousands of units of a single part number is common place. Seemingly inconsequential discrepancies could lead to hours of digging through invoices and orders to identify the root cause of a mismatch. Hailing from the Silicon Valley and having worked with three of the five topmost Fabless companies, AcceLIM is at the forefront of automating supply side order management to provide detailed visibility to its customers, thereby reducing their discrepancy count.

John Stetak, president and CEO of AcceLIM states that often companies struggle to maintain good command over their invoice processing and order confirmation cycles, and can go no more detailed than an aggregate assumption. “Over the last 15 years, we have helped numerous customers reduce their discrepancy range from 20-30 percent down to 2-3 percent, by simply giving them an intricate view of their transactions and applying diagnostics with our tools,” says Stetak.

Stetak advocates what he calls an “exception based” approach to automating accounts payable, a service which his company provides and which his clients use as a tool for facilitating and tracking improvement. Integrated Device Technology, Inc., provider of mixed-signal semiconductor solutions, uses this approach to drive improvement. According to Tom Mumby, director of worldwide purchasing, “The specific tool that’s very useful to us has the ability to look at the category of frequently occurring exceptions, look for the cause, and correct the cause.”

The tool that Mumby describes, AcceL-I-Match, digs down through the releases to varied depths such as a specific lot or work order. As a result, the user can quickly analyse the fallout at hand, identify logical pockets of discrepancies and facilitate actions to eliminate them. When a company orders ten, receives eight, and is billed for twelve AcceL-I-Match dissects each exception and automatically routes it to the person needing to take action. According to Dave Cianciulli, CEO of DC Electronics, a custom cable manufacturer in southern San Jose, the ability to correlate such issues with a specific receipt document made the entire transactional so visible, it took out much of the work and energy that can now be focused back on the growing their organization.

AcceLIM responds to the growing need for verticalization in quote-to-cash cycles, specifically for their pharmaceutical customers, with Match-to-Terms, a tool that replaces a simple quantity-based PO structure with the ability to review invoices against contractual terms. The company even offers tools to process non-PO based transactions that do not fit standard PO processing. VirtualPO is AcceLIM’s intelligent model that tracks repeatable entities in a transaction set over a time period, and institutionalizes them in PO-based process. Per Stetak, “The technique is similar to taping the knowledge base of your most experienced AP clerk and encapsulating into very efficient software automation that never fails to repeat or forgets a step.”

Over the last 15 years, we have helped numerous customers reduce their discrepancy range from 20-30 percent down to 2-3 percent

“We see a general trend in the way our customers’ transactions have evolved, and the move towards data-based transactions with automated collection and processing being essential to being ready for tomorrow,” notes Stetak. Celebrating their 15th successful year in automating transactional record management and enhancing visibility, AcceLIM stands at a unique position to serve this next iteration of change.