When Getting A Partner Can Speed Up AP Deployments

Accounts payable platforms can be tedious to implement. But that’s even more the case for smaller firms that may have worthwhile products but lack the expertise to get them installed quickly. One AP vendor found itself in just such a situation. PYMNTS.com takes a look at what it did to resolve the issue.

Like most companies rolling out new products, working on one’s own often doesn’t make for the most efficient process, especially when it comes to the deployment process. Additional expertise and technology often are necessary to smooth out the transition.

Accounts payable cloud-products provider Miria Systems found itself in just that type of situation. It was taking customers up to four months to deploy its software products.

Many of Miria’s customers are in the retail, restaurant and retail-banking industries, so they often have regional locations ranging between 500 and 5,000 stores. Miria’s Active Pay software automates the business processing between the corporate locations and the remote offices to provide streamlined processing of invoices, expenses and other financial documents.

Acknowledging it couldn’t reduce its accounts-payable software deployment time on its own, Miria recently chose to strike a strategic partnership and co-marketing agreement with Integritie, a content-management services provider for both cloud-based and on-premise programs. The partnership enables Miria and Integritie to jointly sell Miria’s accounts payable and financial applications, while Miria gains Integritie’s enhanced, cloud-based integration capabilities.

“One year ago, it would have taken 12 to 16 weeks to deploy our accounts payable applications in a customer’s on-premise environment,” Marty Michael, Miria CEO, said in thepartnership announcement. “By leveraging the Integritie KC Online cloud platform, we can now reduce deployment times to around four weeks.”

As a result, the reduced timeline cuts the customer’s integration costs by up to 75 percent, enabling the greatest return on investment benefits, he said.

The combination of Miria’s and Integritie’s services creates a hosted, managed service as opposed to an on-premise software installation, which allows for a rapid, virtually turnkey deployment, a Miria spokesperson explained in an email to PYMNTS.com.

“The hosted solution leverages pre-built configurations, templates and server deployments that are essentially cloned from a master deployment and then configured for each customer’s requirements in that customer’s Hosted virtual environment,” she said.  “This eliminates several weeks of time that would normally be needed to deploy hardware, install software, and test the environments.”

In addition, Miria has created industry best-practice templates and workflows that are also cloned from the baseline system. When the product is configured for each customer, many customers can leverage the out-of-the-box functionality. “This saves weeks of time and a lot of costs associated with deploying custom workflows,” the spokesperson said.  “Of course, many customers will want additional customizations, but the costs and timeline to deploy the initial system are still greatly reduced.”

As part of the partnership deal, Miria also will deliver Active Pay applications from the Integritie KC Online Content Management cloud directly to its clients using Integritie’s global KC Online cloud infrastructure, the companies said.

Moving accounts-payable services into the cloud is becoming a growing trend, as a variety of companies now support such services. In May, for example, Kofax Ltd.rolled out Kofax AG Ability, a cloud-based analytics service that lets business users assess their accounts-payable processes, measure staff productivity levels, view the status of invoices being processed and assess spend management.

According to recent research, organizations with high levels of AP automation save 39% of invoice processing costs and enjoy 15 percent to 20 percent faster processing times compared with peer groups that use manual processes.