times there are payments made that appear to be duplicates but are really not, for example, payments to government agencies where a fixed amount is paid every month, or quarterly, and the account number is used as the invoice number and therefore repeated on invoice payments.
             Shell also utilizes reports that gather information about payments and also does a comparison of different payments on the four items mentioned earlier. The Vendor Control Desk in the Accounts Payable Department runs these reports. The reports classify data matches from type one to type five, which means that a match type one signifies that all four items matched whereas a match type five means only two items, vendor number and invoice number, matched. Reports for Match Type Five were discontinued a year or two ago because it was decided that the amount of duplicate payments the report was finding did not justify the amount of time it took to run and review the report. After all, it only looked for a match on vendor number and invoice number.
             Recently, a couple of duplicate payments were made. The first invoice came to the attention of the Accounts Payable Department's supervisor by one of the other Shell Exploration and Production departments, which input the invoice. What brought the duplicate payments to the attention of the next level of management was the fact that one of the payments was for a very large amount of money. The invoice processor who paid the duplicate invoice made the payment from a copy of the original invoice. When she attempted to put in the vendor number, invoice number, invoice date and invoice amount, the system gave her a warning message. She thought the reason she was getting the
             warning was because the charge code she was using was over its allotted budget for the year, so she changed the date of the invoice and was then able to put it in the system.
             The goal used to define the problem of...