A Fortune 500 Manufacturing Company
Paper-Based AP Processes Become Digital with Minimal Changes
A DataServ Client since 2004
Key Results:
- Reduced the overall AP approval process timeline from weeks to a few days
- Gained an additional 30+ days of visibility
Key Stats:
- Invoice Volume: 567,000+ annually
- Team Size: 1,000 – 5,000
- ERPs: Oracle
- Industry: Manufacturing
Executive Summary
One of DataServ’s long-time clients is a Fortune 500 global manufacturer of power and environmental control systems. Since it’s official beginning in 1965, the company had been utilizing a heavily paper-based AP process. The inefficiencies generated by such a cumbersome manual process included misplaced paperwork, an inability to track price variances, a time-consuming short pay process, and inefficient processing of checks.
Outcomes
The company began routing all inbound invoices to designated P.O. boxes which are managed by DataServ to receive and separate incoming invoices. The mail was then collected by DataServ, prepped, scanned, and put through the Invoice Processing Machine (our intelligent SaaS OCR). Once the header and line data is captured, the invoices are auto-routed into different digital work queues based on the data contained on the documents.
Taking this enormous amount of manual labor away from the company provided 30+ days of additional visibility and allowed the manufacturer a more wholistic view of their AP department, including:
- Immediate discrepancy detection, allowing for previously unachieved continuity in the company’s AP process.
- Reduction in the overall AP approval process timeline; What once took weeks now takes only a few days.
- A custom digital pricing report that could be accessed by the company’s buyers to ensure the price quotes matched the outgoing payments.
Business Impact
The challenge presented by the Fortune 500 manufacturing company pushed the DataServ team to develop a highly sophisticated workflow process. The company now has a system that not only leverages automation, but also allows their buyers and AP staff to work closely together to compare notes ‘on the fly’ and resolve exceptions early in the process.
Today, the company’s employees can access their digital AP documents quickly and securely from multiple locations around the world. On the back end, DataServ provides the full document lifecycle management of the imaged documents.
Thoughts from a Fortune 500 Manufacturing Company
“The improvements our department gained with DataServ were almost instantaneous. Many of our processes have improved, including our short-pay and approval processes, which before were challenging and involved many people and a lot of time.
“Our company is a worldwide corporation, and there are invoices that need approval from all over the country. Consolidating all invoices to be mailed to specific P.O. boxes allows the Accounts Payable staff to digitally route invoices for approval. What in the past took sometimes weeks, now takes only a few days!
“We can already see more ways for making the process more efficient. This program is wonderful to work with. Our expectations have been exceeded, and we look forward to many years with DataServ.”
Let’s Start a Conversation
Regardless of where you are at in your AP automation journey, DataServ will meet you there and help you evolve.