The pain points of paper: Leeco Steel thinks beyond document imaging to paperless automation

With considerable growth in contracts and geography at the end of 2013, Leeco Steel was less eager to add people than it was to "[make everybody] more efficient in preparation for our growth," said CFO Mark Krzmarzick. 

Leeco Steel traces its origin to 1882 - the same year that Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show debuted. So, it has been modernizing for 132 years, with both steelmaking innovation and overcoming legacy business processes.

It now manages its 11 locations in the US, Canada, Chile, and Mexico using Microsoft Dynamics GP. With that expansion, Leeco experienced all the growing pains related to legacy accounting, such as error-prone manual entry of invoices and laborious month-end processes. Company growth simply piled the hours on those processes.

The company's legacy document imaging system had eased the burden somewhat, for five years. But says Leeco System Administrator George Hock, "[We] were looking for something to automate the entire process," and eliminate manual entry. The company further required web access, and the ability to make programming changes, which had compounded expense with the previous imaging vendor. 

Thus, the company's requirements went far beyond document imaging: it needed to turn paper processes into electronic ones.

In 2014, Krzmarzick and his team began searching for solutions to streamline its AP processes, and singled out Metafile's MetaViewer.  

MetaViewer integrates with every Microsoft Dynamics ERP, including Dynamics 365 for Operations. Metafile's Tom Ress speaks of a "merger between" MetaViewer and Dynamics GP, versus an integration. 

"Most other [document imaging] tools just bring ...