Avanto Delivers Productivity Gains, Bottom-Line Savings to NextGen Security
Dwight Smith
Senior Vice President of
Finance and Administration
As Senior Vice President of Finance and Administration at NextGen Security LLC, Dwight Smith serves as a key member of the management team at one of the country’s leading providers of physical and electronic security solutions.
A veteran of the electronic security industry with over 20 years’ experience, Smith plays a critical role for a company that puts a premium on continuous improvement and leadership in technology deployment and business process automation.
“The pace of change in corporate America today is so fast that there’s no room for complacency for just about any organization, no matter its size or the market it serves,” he contends.
That’s why NextGen has partnered with Matt Danyliw and his team at Avanto for the past three years to create workflows and processes that consistently leverage technology to deliver significant productivity gains and bottom line savings.
“As an organization, NextGen was in fine shape three years ago, but we were growing quickly and it was very clear we would need to add staff to accommodate additional volume if we didn’t change how we were doing things,” Smith recalls.
Where to begin?
For the Smith-Danyliw team, AP invoice entry seemed to offer a logical place to start. “These days just about any transaction entered by hand is viewed as an inefficiency and our accounts payables invoice processing was a very labor intensive process,” says Smith.
“I found that Matt and I tended to speak the same language with regard to workflow, exceptions and processing rules so it was extremely easy to put together a specification to automate the accounts payable function, specifically AP invoice entry.”
The results speak for themselves.
When NextGen brought in Avanto to work on its accounts payables, the company was processing somewhere in the region of 150 invoices a week. Today, that number stands at over 300, yet thanks to Avanto and its business process automation expertise, no extra staff has been added and the person in charge of AP processing is now managing by exception and enjoying welcome new bandwidth to handle additional tasks.
“I would have to give Matt and his team 9.5 out of ten in terms of their knowledge and expertise in financial management and transaction processing,” says Smith, a grade that at NextGen Security has translated directly into significant bottom-line savings.
Avanto has also worked with NextGen to automate receiving purchase orders with similar results and is looking forward to bringing its expertise to bear on other aspects of its financial management in the not too distant future.
“Even after the Covid pandemic, the economic outlook will remain uncertain and we will continue to find bottlenecks and manual processes that Avanto can help us resolve and automate,” Smith predicts. “They will continue to allow us to function as a lean organization that’s run by people who are focusing their time on managing instead of trying to manage while also doing at the same time,” he adds.
“For NextGen Security, working with Avanto means we need fewer resources to get more work done and that’s a good thing for any organization!”