Evergreen Packaging Case Study

How Can Automated Invoice Management Save Time, Reduce Costs, and Strengthen Business Relationships?

Company Profile

From milk cartons to envelopes, to-go cups, and more, Evergreen Packaging Inc. is dedicated to providing durable fiber-based packaging that is both convenient for consumers and environmentally friendly. As a business, Evergreen Packaging also prides itself on being the best possible partner to its customers and vendors. A big part of that is ensuring efficient and accurate invoice management and doing everything it can to reduce operational costs.

Objective

Define a strategy for the lifecycle of not only their current finance documents but also net-new documentation for a VIM implementation project.

Evergreen Case study web

Project Description

Evergreen Packaging needed to improve the efficiency of its accounts payable (AP) team and increase visibility into invoicing. With SAP Invoice Management by OpenText and the option for OCR, it is automating invoice processing, accelerating payments, and saving money with faster discount identification.

Products Utilized

  • SAP Invoice Management by OpenText

Before: Challenges and Opportunities

  • Increase efficiency and improve productivity in AP by reducing invoice processing time
  • Eliminate errors caused by manual data entry
  • Improve visibility into liability exposure for in-process invoices (not yet posted)
  • Reduce the occurrence of late payments to improve vendor relationships
  • Take advantage of cash discount

 

Why SAP with Optima Consulting

  • Integration of SAP Invoice Management with the existing SAP ERP application
  • Tried and tested implementation expertise from Optima Consulting  
  • Extraction of data from invoice images using optical character recognition (OCR), followed by validation
    of field formats and some field values to correct errors in the extracted data
  • Direct invoice transfer to SAP ERP using e-mail, OCR, and SAP technology for intermediate document (IDoc) transfer
  • Automated invoice exception and approval integrated with the standard business process workflow of SAP ERP

 

“SAP Invoice Management is helping our AP team to be more efficient. We now have greater visibility into the entire invoicing process, which enables our AP team to maximize discounts and make payments on time.”

-Sanjay Srivastava, Director of SAP Solution Management, Evergreen Packaging Inc.

 

After: Value-Driven Results

  • More-timely vendor payments with fewer lost discounts, thanks to greater payment visibility
  • Better understanding of liabilities of unposted payments
  • Greater savings by ensuring discounted invoices are processed first through validation sorting
  • Lower operational costs for AP by reducing the workload for AP processor

 

 

Industry
Mill Products

Customer
Packaging Company

Solutions and Benefits

20-30%
Increase in invoice automation

35% Of invoices posted after validation without any further manual processing

80% increase in the discounts taken by processing discounted invoices first

1.5 FTE Reduction in workload by automating manual processes

OPTM01837-Paper-Mockup-Forrester

Download the success story, "How Can Automated Invoice Management Save Time, Reduce Costs, and Strengthen Business Relationships?" to see how Evergreen Packaging has increased efficiency and visibility across the invoicing process, with SAP and Optima.

Download and Share This Case Study