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.
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
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.
