TESTIMONIAL: Hayward Allen Toyota – AP Automation and Workflow
Heyward Allen Toyota – Automating the AP Invoice Approval Workflow
As one of the oldest new vehicle franchises under the same continuous family ownership in Athens GA, Heyward Allen Toyota is one of only two dealerships in the state of Georgia to be awarded the J.D. Power Certified Retailer designation for two consecutive years. This prestigious award recognizes the “Best of the Best” in new vehicle sales satisfaction.
Four Questions we asked Heyward Allen
- Is your approval routing process manually managed?
- Are you faxing/emailing expense invoices for approval?
- Are your approvers making hand written notes on the invoices?
- Does your AP team have to hunt down the AP invoices after sent for approval?
These four questions stimulated a review of Heyward Allen’s accounts payable process and procedures. mxrAutoDocs’ workflow functionality was presented as a means to automate and better manage the accounts payable approval process. After defining the workflow path and approval tiers the implementation was straightforward and easily adapted by all users.
“Expense invoice routing and approval is another added benefit of mxrAutoDocs. Heyward-Allen Toyota has replaced shuffling paper AP Invoices for review and approval throughout the dealership with an automated email workflow provided by mxrAutoDocs for those invoices pending approvals. AP simply adds the invoices into the system with the approver selected and mxrAutoDocs does the rest. No more tracking people down or wondering who has what paperwork” Mark Thomas, Controller
Future mxrAutoDocs automation projects for Heyward Allen include the management and compilation of WorryFree documentation for Certified Used Cars and Deal Jacket document inclusion compliance and auditing.
Steve Middlebrooks, Dealer Principal, “mxrAutoDocs is the perfect solution to effectively manage records and save valuable space. Our service technicians and advisors are saving significant amounts of time retrieving information, and the AP automation is a great compliment to our business process. . Investing in mxrAutoDocs is one of the smartest business decisions a company could make.”
Heyward Allen Toyota – Repair Order Document Storage
As one of the oldest new vehicle franchises under the same continuous family ownership in Athens GA, Heyward Allen Toyota is one of only two dealerships in the state of Georgia to be awarded the J.D. Power Certified Retailer designation for two consecutive years. This prestigious award recognizes the “Best of the Best” in new vehicle sales satisfaction.
In the process of maintaining and repairing customers’ automobiles, Heyward-Allen Toyota’s service departments all together generates over 3,500 repair orders and accompanying paper documentation each month. All these documents must be filed and be readily accessible for Heyward-Allen’s service personnel to provide the superior level of service its customers expect. Over the years, however, filing, storing and retrieving the growing volume of paper records (250,000 + files!) had become more and more problematic.
Heyward-Allen’s technicians use mxrAutoDocs primarily to view the repair history of vehicles they are servicing. This aids in diagnosing problems, ensures that repairs are perfected and helps Heyward-Allen to comply with manufacturer documentation requirements, an especially helpful capability when parts must be special-ordered and when repairs are made under warranty.
“Like most automobile dealerships we had excessive amounts of square footage dedicated to physical document storage,” says Mark Thomas, Controller. “Trying to find paper records was like looking for the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack. With 250,000 paper files in storage, the labor costs to regularly file, find and retrieve them were tremendous. When we were presented the opportunity to electronically store and manage our Repair Order document volume using mxrAutoDocs cloud base solution we saw an opportunity to solve our massive document storage problem. mxrAutoDocs not only solved our paper storage problem, it also boosted the productivity of our technicians. Because vehicle repair histories are now available at their workstations, our technicians no longer have to leave their bays to locate historical information. Accessing information to support our Warranty Claims is easy using the user intuitive document viewer.”
Based on its success in the Service Department, Heyward-Allen plans to deploy mxrAutoDocs in phases throughout other areas of the business.