Leading Global Subsidiary Automates
Accounts Payable Processes Achieves Improved Workflow and Efficiencies
Driven to consolidate accounting functions A Fortune Global 500 conglomerate had successfully leveraged its investment
in technology to help secure a subsidiary into a leadership position in a highly
competitive global market. To strengthen its hold within the marketplace,
the company sought to extend its use of technology to streamline business
processes to reveal new efficiencies and lower operational costs. After an
internal audit, the company’s finance and accounting function emerged as a
key area where such an investment in technology could yield significant results.
With 66 staff members at over 30 accounting locations worldwide to support
its numerous factories and head office, the cost and time to process invoices
from thousands of vendors was extremely costly and inefficient. Additionally,
because of the distribution of offices and accounting personnel, the application
of internal controls was inconsistent.
To improve the internal controls of the purchasing function as well as the quality
of the information flowing to management while decreasing costs, the company’s
professional services consultant recommended consolidating the
accounts payable function into a shared services center. The key would be to
automate the financial accounting process to improve workflow and achieve
greater efficiencies and operational cost savings.
AUTOMATING ACCOUNTING PROCESSES IN A SHARED SERVICES CENTER
Specifically, the company required a flexible solution that would be compatible
with its established financial and ERP systems. The system needed to be
able to capture over 250,000 documents per year and scale to handle over
1 million per year. Plus, it had to support document processing for multiple
countries and perform 3-way validation against delivery notes and purchase
orders, and extract and reconcile the value-added tax (VAT). Equally important,
the solution had to minimize the amount of manual tasks and the requisite
personnel to perform them.
A/P-distiller™ was chosen for its ability to scale to meet the size requirements
of the company while seamlessly integrating with its front-end document management
system as well as its back-end ERP. In fact, A/P-distiller’s ability to be
rapidly implemented accelerated the company’s cost savings and payback on
the system. From start to finish, the company implemented A/P-distiller in the
first rollout phase within 90 days.
A/P-distiller provided the company a single solution to address its document
capture needs. In its evaluation, the company found that while traditional
imaging solutions convert paper to electronic formats, they fail to successfully
capture content. In contrast, A/P-distiller sorts, extracts, and posts data
based upon content requirements, regardless of document format.
RECORD RESULTS
This ability extends A/P-distiller’s use to virtually any data capture application
within the company. A/Pdistiller utilizes the proprietary Brainware® engine, to
learn by example to minimize the costs and time of human intervention.
A/P-distiller analyzes incoming information, and recognizes and classifies the
information based upon the actual content of the document. On average, the
company processes over 65% of its documents without human intervention.
The consultant and Brainware’s Professional Services team worked together
to implement A/P-distiller on behalf of the customer. The data capture solution
receives the documents in batches at its runtime server. Batches include
invoices and other accounting documents such as purchase orders, statements,
and memos.
A/P-distiller OCRs the company’s scanned documents and classifies them
based upon their content-no presorting is required. Next, the system automatically
verifies the document’s classification by comparing extracted purchase
order, invoice, and vendor information against its ERP database. The
verified information is then automatically posted into the company’s ERP system.
As a result, the company’s associates now spend their time working on business
issues and processing exceptions rather than keypunching routine documents.
In fact, within three months of implementation, the A/P staff was
reduced from 66 to 12-a change of over 80%.
The system was architected to enable the company to roll it out in phases while
scaling to accommodate an increase in the volume of documents. Within 12
months, the company transitioned nine countries in which it had accounting
operations to its shared services center. In addition, the company increased
the number of documents it processed to more than 1 million per year.
Through its implementation of A/P-distiller, the company has successfully
reduced its accounts payable inefficiencies, manpower requirements, and
operational costs by minimizing sorting, keying, and exception handling activities.
It has also received hard-cost benefits by reducing overpayments and late
payment fees, and increased early payment discounts.
The company plans to extend A/P-distiller to automate additional inefficient
business processes. When integrated with the company’s business systems,
A/P-distiller will automate the capture, classification, and distribution of incoming
correspondence including e-mail, faxes, and traditional mail. Ultimately,
A/P-distiller will facilitate the delivery of these disparate forms of correspondence
to the appropriate person via e-mail within seconds.
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