Keplr Vision provides a collaborative partnership of robust business support services and supply chain management to optometry practices, allowing doctors to spend more time on their practice and maintaining their legacy. The company strives to be influential in the optometry industry by advocating for all doctors and encouraging them to practice at the highest level that their state, license, training, or comfort will allow. The leadership team continues to search for ways to improve processes and offer doctors the ability to pilot treatment technologies. This allows optometrists to deliver next-level care to patients that they are not receiving anywhere else.
Keplr started from the ground up, beginning in 2005 with the opening of a single optometry clinic. After 15 years, an additional 20 clinics opened followed by tremendous growth in partnerships with private practice optometry doctors. Now, Keplr has almost 300 locations across the United States. As they continue to grow, Keplr recognizes the importance of aligning and improving processes before acquiring further locations.
Since 2020, Keplr has leveraged NetSuite to manage various aspects of their day-to-day operations. Utilizing NetSuite helps them to streamline accounts payable, bank and credit reconciliation, lease tracking, and fixed asset management. Following their NetSuite implementation, Keplr saw the potential of NetSuite and looked to automate processes further. One area they evaluated right away was their vendor onboarding process. After the initial go-live, the company decided to manually add vendors into NetSuite. Very quickly, Keplr identified several risks, including the lack of verification system or audit in place to make sure the vendor information was accurate. To address these challenges, they implemented a manual review process to review accuracy of the entered data in NetSuite.
While the manual review process worked temporarily, this approach was very time consuming and left room for error. As Keplr grew, the sheer volume of vendors continued to increase and necessitated the search for an automated solution. It was important to find a solution that was not only cost effective, but also built right in NetSuite as Keplr did not want to add another business application to their ecosystem.
“There was no vendor audit in place other than the manual review. We quickly realized that we needed an automated process due to the sheer volume of vendors.”
Kelley Hall,Accounts Payable Manager
How Charted helps
After searching for solutions, Keplr found the Charted, formerly SquareWorks Consulting, Advanced Vendor Onboarding solution through NetSuite’s SuiteApp store. They ultimately chose Charted due to its ease of use, configurability, simplified implementation and maintenance due to the solution being 100% NetSuite-native, and ability to achieve their specific requirements.
We were looking for a vendor onboarding solution that was cost effective, built specifically
Beth Stoecker
for NetSuite, easy to customize based on how we would like to use it, and provided ease of
use. Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding solution checked all our boxes.Treasury Operations Senior Manager/AP
Solution design
Prior to implementing Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding, Keplr faced challenges in their vendor onboarding process. One of their primary goals was to place responsibility on the vendors, ensuring accurate and up to date information. Charted worked with Keplr to achieve this goal by creating an onboarding form that met their business requirements. While Charted provides professionally designed onboarding forms, the company wanted to customize the form with additional fields to deliver a personalized onboarding experience. By customizing the form, Keplr also saw an opportunity to repurpose the form for other vendor onboarding needs without relying on Charted.
“The Charted customizable vendor onboarding form exceeded our expectation. Now that the project has ended, we’re able to repurpose the same form for other vendor onboarding needs.”
Kelley Hall,Accounts Payable Manager
Implementation of Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding
As the implementation continued, Keplr expressed the importance of streamlining the vendor onboarding process to reduce time and effort. Previously, the team would pull a report in NetSuite of all updates made from the week prior. Then, they exported this to Excel and manually reviewed to identify any changes. This process would take the team an entire day to review all of the vendors on the list for just the prior week. If the team needed to make any notes, they would manually add these in Excel and then place them in NetSuite. This process was very tedious and made it difficult to follow-up with vendors.
After implementing Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding, Keplr does not need to wait an entire week to perform a manual audit to identify changes. Now, once the vendor finishes filling out the customized onboarding form, the information is automatically visible in NetSuite. This solution streamlined the review process, so now the team can go in and approve as needed. The team can also add notes directly into NetSuite in order to accurately keep their vendors updated. Having this audit in place provided Keplr validation that the vendors being onboarded were properly screened and evaluated based on predefined criteria such as financial stability, reputation, and compliance history. By conducting due diligence, they can minimize the risk of partnering
with unreliable or non-compliant vendors.
Since implementing Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding, my workload has been cut down significantly. The approvals are simpler and there’s less room for error because we’re putting the responsibility back on the vendor.
Heather GregoryAccounts Payable Staff Accountant II
“Instead of keeping a manual list or spreadsheet, Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding has made it easier for us to follow up with vendors if we’re waiting on something. We have it right there in our system with all the data of who we’ve sent forms to and who we’re waiting on.”
Heather Gregory,Accounts Payable Staff Accountant II
Go-live and transformation
Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding solution has been instrumental in transforming Keplr’s vendor onboarding and management process. By automating and streamlining this process, Keplr has experienced enhanced productivity, improved accuracy, and significant time savings. The customized forms and NetSuite-native capabilities have provided them with a scalable solution that aligns perfectly with their growth plans and vision of revolutionizing the optometry industry.
“There’s a lot of value in time and productivity after implementing Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding solution. While we cannot place a number on the cost savings piece, we’ve saved money in manpower.”
Kelley Hall,Accounts Payable Manager
While Keplr’s initial focus was to utilize Charted Advanced Vendor Onboarding for onboarding new vendors, they have also recently started leveraging the solution to update existing vendors as well. They have further configured the solution to create additional forms for specific needs including cases where a W9 is not required or when vendors want to switch payment methods.
“The Charted team worked diligently with us to customize the vendor onboarding form and made it very easy to setup in NetSuite. We have saved a significant amount of time and effort and are now able to customize the form for other purposes.”
Kelley Hall,Accounts Payable Manager
In addition, Keplr also partners with Charted on their Check Printing solution. Since implementing this solution, Keplr has lowered their check printing costs by enabling the use of blank check stock in NetSuite, strengthened the security of their check printing process by eliminating the use of pre-printed stock that contains live bank information, and saved time by printing their digital signature on checks. If you’re interested in learning more about Charted Check Printing, please click here.
For more information about Charted, including Advanced Vendor Onboarding, click here.
