This company is one of the largest drinks companies in Europe, formed in April 2004. They are part of the largest wine company in the world and a leading producer and exporter of wine from the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The company has a strong portfolio of brands from the wine, cider, fortified wine, wine-style drinks and bottled water categories.
The decision to automate Accounts Payable
Their Accounts Payable (AP) department consisted of 13 people processing in the region of 180,000 invoices per year from suppliers across Europe. Invoices need to be approved by 250 individuals from 3 offices in the UK, 11 depots and 2 manufacturing plants, in addition to users in mainland Europe.
Dealing with this volume in a manual operation was causing several problems. Invoice processing was extremely paper intensive; a considerable amount of time and effort was spent data inputting, chasing paper invoices and filing. It was often difficult to locate invoices and the AP team would waste time contacting the business users to trace invoices. This resulted in a lack of efficiency and a lack of control over the process. There had also been an issue of making a number of duplicate payments.
The decision was made to automate the invoice
automated invoice processing ; to streamline the department and ultimately to be benchmarked as an exemplary AP process. The search began to find a solution that could meet their needs: integrate tightly with their ERP solution, be sufficiently flexible to mirror their processes and be easy for the AP team to use. "We chose to go with our final supplier because we felt they took the time to really investigate our process, work with us to design the most efficient system and were able to prove the seamless integration with our ERP system and had a very effective workflow solution."
How the AP department has been automated
Paper invoices entering the AP department are now scanned into the IMS (Invoice Management Solution) system. Using Automated Data Capture technologies, the header information, such as invoice total, supplier name, etc, is automatically read from the invoice. The integration between IMS and the ERP then enables this data to be populated directly to register the invoice in the financial system, with minimal manual data entry required. If IMS does not recognise the vendor, workflow automatically sends this as a query to the business user, who can then select whether this is a new vendor to be set up in the ERP or is just a one-off vendor. The integration between IMS and the ERP triggers the creation of the appropriate vendor. This ensures that delays are not created with unknown vendors and speeds up the process of adding new vendors to the finance system.
Automatic pre matching: Invoices that are associated with a Purchase Order (PO) are now matched in the ERP within a tolerance. Any invoices that fail to successfully match the PO are automatically routed to the procurer using workflow, for resolution using IMS.
Non-PO related invoices need to be coded and approved by the original procurer. Previously this was an entirely manual process, with each invoice being posted via the internal mail from AP to the individual who codes the invoice, then returned to AP, then sent out to the procurer of the goods to authorise This process was not only time consuming but fraught with errors and the risk of invoices getting lost.
IMS now routes each invoice to be coded and authorised by the correct individual. Some invoices are automatically sent by IMS and others are routed by the AP clerk If the system is not entirely confident of this selection, the AP user will initiate the distribution of the invoice to the procurer for authorisation. If they do not have the correct sign-off limit, IMS determines the appropriate individual to forward it to until final approval is achieved.