Pay as you go

Line managers at Tridel like it too. Kevin McKeown, a construction project manager, says Zero Invoice has reduced the time he spends matching invoices with purchase agreements and verifying prices, from one to two hours per day during the last two weeks of the month to just one to two hours per month.

"It's a great tool, and it's helped me a lot," he says.

The "tool" consists of modifications and enhancements to Tridel's commercial accounting package, custom-coded using MicrosoftMicrosoft Corp.'s . "From a systems point of view, this was not super challenging. It's mostly slogging it out and keeping it simple," Maulucci notes. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

He says he got the idea from similar programs in the manufacturing sector and from a home builders conference two years ago. Another visionary at Tridel seized on it right away, but Maulucci acknowledges that some of the old guard were skeptical and remain so. "Getting an organization to change this dramatically is tough," he says. "It's such a fundamental shift."

"Ted Maulucci has proven to be a real IT innovator in the industry," says Howard Berger, a managing partner at Realcomm Conference Group LLC in Carlsbad, Calif. "He really rethought the process, and it seems to work. I think it will be a beacon for other companies."