CASE STUDY: GOODS RECEIPT
75% INVOICES AUTOMATED
ROI IN 5 MONTHS
25% FTE REDUCTION
OVERVIEW
Proservartner worked alongside an international building materials distributor with 35 locations across
Europe. Rising costs in their established Shared Service Centre had meant a review of strategy and the
firm were considering alternatives to hiring more staff and wanted to look into automation, starting
with their invoice processing process.
CHALLENGES
The organisation had 200,000 invoices coming into 35 different locations around Europe. This meant
that they needed to employ over 100 approvers to keep up with the demand. The invoice approval
process took typically more than 40 days. This caused slow payment to vendors, a lack of visibility, and
delays in the accruals process. They were looking for a way to streamline the entire process and
reduce FTE due to the rising costs of operating in that country.
WE DELIVERED
Proservartner mapped out their current processes and saw that a lot of information was currently
being siloed on local networks and local devices. In order to really deliver the anticipated value it was
key to aggregate this data to one source and so we moved their AP data to the cloud instead of being
on a local network, which meant that we were able to standardise and automate processes on a
global scale. It also had the benefit of allowing suppliers to remotely access their data and documents
online which has also reduced time taken by the AP team in giving updates.
We were able to put in place technology which extracted and processed invoices, sent and chased for
the relevant approval and conducted three way matching.
OUR RESULTS
The organisation now automatically match 75% of all of their invoices. This means that the invoices
will run straight through the AP process without any manual intervention at all. The AP team are now
able to focus solely on the more time consuming invoices, or ones where further information may be
needed /discrepancies may be present. The invoice approval process which was typically more than
40 days, now only takes 10 days. The company were able to release 25% FTEs and have a future plan
to simply not replace an additional 10% of staff. Although job losses are never positive, were it not for
the streamlining afforded by technology, the shared service centre would have quickly become
untenable