Palm Springs Aerial Tramway

Challenge

The Tramway has steadily become a must-see experience for Palm Springs visitors since its opening. Over the past 15 years they’ve experienced more than 50% growth, going from 400,000 to over 630,000 riders per year. The business impact has been significant, requiring new processes to ensure that the office continues to run as smoothly and on time as the trams.

In particular, storage was a big issue – the Tramway just had too much paper, making storing and finding documents extremely difficult. Additionally, the approval cycle was often slow and tedious, requiring staff to physically be in the office to move paperwork through. And the auditing process was grueling, finding all the required documents was time consuming, and storing them in the office until the audit was complete was cumbersome.

Solution

DocLink has greatly improved the Tramway’s AP process entirely. All POs and invoices are digital, there’s no paper to manage. AP is able to scan invoices, match them up with POs, send them for approval, and easily track the status of documents – all electronically. AP no longer spends hours searching for documents left on desks, or stored somewhere in the office, or in the semi- truck sized on-site storage container. Nor are they waiting for approvers to return to the office to obtain invoice approvals.

Tara Meinke, VP of Finance/Accounting for the Tramway says, “Before DocLink, if someone wanted a PO approved, they had to manually fill it out and walk it around, and often approvers weren’t in the office. Once approved, invoices would be turned into AP, who would try to match them up to incoming invoices. It was a very time consuming, manual process. Now it’s just so simple. Everyone can access DocLink, POs are created within a Smart Form, and invoices that come in can easily be matched and sent off to the correct person for approval. It’s all done electronically.”

Benefits

“DocLink has been a lifesaver for us, a game changer. It has really improved our AP function, just in every aspect, in regards to saving time, saving space and just having the documents at your fingertips,” states Meinke.

The Tramway uses DocLink for journal entries as well. “The Sage 100 integration is great,” says Meinke. “Any entry we make in Sage 100 automatically gets captured in DocLink and then we can scan in the backup. It cuts down significantly on having to find the backup and with audits.”

With a 50% ridership increase, the biggest time and cost savings has been in AP. Meinke states, “Our AP person’s workload 14 years ago was manageable, but everything took a lot longer to do. Everything now is so much quicker, if we were still doing paper we would have definitely needed two full time people for the past 10+ years to process invoices. So DocLink has enabled immense growth of our business without having to add any additional staff because she has been able to absorb that increase.”