Automating your vendor invoice management processes with SAP Invoice Management by OpenText (VIM) can significantly improve efficiency. However, out-of-the-box, VIM provides minimal standard reports and only raw data exports with limited insights. This leaves Accounts Payable (AP) teams struggling to uncover inefficiencies and optimize processes, forcing them to rely on time-consuming manual data analysis.
The Challenges of Manual Data Analysis
For many organizations, the limitations of standard VIM reporting force advanced data analysts to spend significant time manually extracting, normalizing, organizing, and analyzing raw data to answer critical questions:
- What is our overall Accounts Payable performance?
- Can we reliably measure our KPIs?
- Does our IDOC channel deliver a touchless process?
- Is our average cost of processing an invoice higher than industry benchmarks?
- Do we pay suppliers on time? If not, why?
- Which vendors’ invoices require special attention, and why?
- Is our invoicing process transparent to all stakeholders?
- What fields does our VIM scanning solution structurally miss?
- Where should we focus VIM’s training efforts?
This process is not only time-consuming but also repetitive. Furthermore, most standard reports are designed to compare specific values, not provide an overarching view of system functionality. This lack of flexibility makes it difficult to identify hidden inefficiencies, leaving AP teams with little time to focus on meaningful analysis and action.
Actionable Tips to Enhance VIM Reporting
To help you overcome these challenges, here are five actionable tips to enhance your VIM reporting and drive better results for your Procure-to-Pay (P2P) processes:
- Define and Track Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Ensure your AP team is aligned on which KPIs to track, such as touchless invoice processing rates, average invoice approval times, and cost per invoice. Regularly reviewing these metrics can highlight trends and inefficiencies. - Leverage Data Visualization Tools
Invest in tools that convert raw data into actionable dashboards and charts. Visualizing data makes it easier to identify patterns and bottlenecks, enabling your team to take quicker action. - Standardize Reporting Templates
Create templates for consistent reporting across teams. Standardization ensures everyone is reviewing the same data and eliminates redundant reporting efforts. - Integrate AP Data Across Systems
Streamline data flow between your invoice management system, ERP, and reporting tools. Integration reduces data silos and improves reporting accuracy and completeness. - Adopt Advanced Analytics Solutions
Upgrade to a solution like Optima’s Insights and Analytics package to automate data extraction, normalization, and reporting. This eliminates time spent on repetitive tasks and frees your team to focus on improving processes.
The Solution: Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics
If you’re managing Accounts Payable with VIM, you don’t have to settle for standard reports. Optima’s Insights and Analytics package is a cost-effective way to easily extract the necessary data and assemble it into understandable, process-focused dashboards, reports and recommendations. This allows your team to focus on determining actionable insights instead of wasting time manipulating data tables.
Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics package is asolution that delivers:
Pre-Configured Dashboards and KPI’s: Presents a “helicopter view” of your vendor invoices throughout your AP processes. It can visually slice and dice endlessly into company codes, vendor account groups, types of invoices, document dates, channels and more.
Standard Dashboard Views
From day one, you get a complete view of the end-to-end invoice life cycle organized into specific areas to help you monitor your procure-to-pay processes and identify what is working well, as well as any issues or bottlenecks. The standard dashboards are:
- Vendor Invoice Overview
- Invoice Payment Analysis
- Date Analysis
- Waste Analysis
- Exception Analysis
- Vendor Analysis
- OCR Performance
Extended Dashboards
In addition to standard dashboards, the Optima solution includes more detailed Extended Dashboards that provide deeper insight into your invoice processes. The four Extended Dashboards are:
-
- AP Dashboard
- Automation
- NPO Productivity
- PO Productivity
These dashboards are a new addition to the ever-evolving Insights and Analytics package, and reveal time on tasks per user, time on tasks per role, unidentified user actions, and more.
Executive Reports with Recommendations by VIM Experts
In addition to the easy-to-view dashboards, our solution provides you with a quarterly Executive Report produced by our invoice management team of VIM experts. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of what is working well and what needs to be improved with your current processes. It also prescribes strategic recommendations to eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your system and improve both short- and long-term ROI.
Key Benefits of Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics
- Eliminate Manual Work: Free your AP team from tedious data manipulation and focus on actionable analysis.
- Improve Process Transparency: Gain a clear view of your Procure-to-Pay process and pinpoint bottlenecks.
- Boost ROI: Identify opportunities to optimize efficiency, strengthen vendor relationships, and reduce costs.
See the Difference with Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics
In addition to dashboards and reports, Optima’s Executive Insights program includes a quarterly report with detailed analysis and recommendations tailored to your business. Want to see what additional reports are included? Download the list here.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your VIM solution? Reach out to our team to learn how Optima Executive Insights can transform your reporting, streamline your processes, and deliver actionable analytics tailored to your needs.
