Ft. Lauderdale, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/7/2005 -- Quality Digest online profiles a feature article by the North American Manufacturing Journalist Thomas R. Cutler in December 2005.

The feature article can be found at www.trcutlerinc.com and Cutler details the quality process with outside operations-expense management firms is much different. Instead of three steps, there are more than ten documented quality steps depending on the type of solution being offered.

Quality steps for operations-expense management:

• Scanning and bar-coding the bill
• Extracting the data
• Stage one of bill auditing, which includes auditing 120 data points
• Paying the bill
• Uploading the data into Web-hosted software
• Performing information management functions such as analytics and document storage and retrieval
• Invoice auditing
• Rate analysis
• Benchmarking
• Demand-side management
• Performing many other operational-expense management services
• Budget forecasting and variance reporting

"When performing bill auditing and rate analysis services, many utilities in the United States have errors on at least one to three percent of the bills they send to their customers and have at least some of their customers on the wrong rate. Sometimes finding and fixing these quality mistakes translate into small incremental savings, but other times it's a quality error that can add up to a major erroneous expense," said Jeffrey Hart, CEO of Cadence Network, an operations-expense management firm.

Thomas R. Cutler, President & CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based TR Cutler, Inc. (www.trcutlerinc.com), is the nation's leading manufacturing journalist. Cutler is the founder of the Manufacturing Media Consortium of 2000 journalists writing about trends in manufacturing. Cutler is the author of the Manufacturers' Public Relations and Media Guide and a frequently published author within the manufacturing sector…more than 200 feature articles published annually.

TR Cutler, Inc.
www.trcutlerinc.com
Thomas Cutler
954-486-7562