The Accounts Payable process at Apollo Tyres was manual intensive, fragmented, error prone and lacked visibility and control. The increase in the volume of invoices received every day at various locations led to challenges brought about by decentralized processing such as miscommunications, delayed payments and lack of divisional control.

Due to the movement of physical copy of invoices through different departments, tracking the current status of incoming invoices waiting to be processed versus already processed invoices became a significant task. There were challenges of visibility into real time pending liabilities and invoice processing status. Invoices and supporting documents were not digitally integrated with SAP transactions, which created problems at the time of audit and tax assessment. Manual processing and non-standard approval policies posed challenges in terms of high cycle time, process inefficiency, lack of proper trails and compliance.

Additionally, the process of handling the accounting of import licenses was extremely time taking, manual and tedious. The cycle time for processes like CHA handling and reimbursement bills processing were high and required streamlining.

There was requirement of digitally capturing all offline correspondence and approvals in Account Payable workflows.

Apollo wanted digitalization of all the incoming invoices which were previously being received as hard copies, a system driven business rule validation of incoming vendor invoice data and customized approval matrix for invoice approval based on the amount, type of procurement and location.

There was also a need for real-time analytics dashboard and out-of-the-box slice and dice reports, that could improve process visibility in Apollo.

Apollo explored various options and eventually chose to implement the SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution to achieve faster invoice processing from scanning to posting. With these solutions, they achieved higher productivity and better visibility on their invoice processing cycle.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within the time
Apollo chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Apollo to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, requirements, and created a roadmap for implementation, transition and change management. The workshops also covered all the aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Apollo understand how they could leverage the solution to resolve their current Invoice processing challenges. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document covering invoice and payment approval scenarios under the implementation scope. With the support of the Apollo team, the implementation of the solution was completed in 8 months.

Additional Automation solution leads to significant benefits
OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution comes with best-in-class scanning and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application. The OCR application is equipped with intelligent text recognition engine that can support any type of invoice template and data format. This enables Apollo to automate invoice data capture and routing to SAP applications automatically, with minimal need for human intervention.

Apollo is now able to handle the exceptions and approval flows efficiently using the system-driven standardized business rules through workflow automation. OpenText VIM helped Apollo to significantly reduce their invoice processing cycle time with majority of the invoices now being automatically processed and seamless integration with SAP. Real-time analytics and monitoring of invoices that are being processed provides Apollo with the necessary KPIs for continual process improvements.

With the implementation of VIM solution, Apollo has been able to consolidate their Accounts Payable process and can now efficiently process all their invoices.