Borosil Group leverages Avaali and OpenText Vendor Invoice Management to automate their shared services centre for Accounts Payable process

Borosil Group leveraged OpenText Vendor Invoice Management to automate their shared services centre for invoice processing.

Borosil is the market leader for laboratory glassware and microwavable kitchenware in India. The company’s products include laboratory glassware, instruments, disposable plastics, liquid handling systems and explosion-proof lighting glassware. Established in 1962, Borosil has a network of over 10,000 retail outlets and 150 dealers spread across the length and breadth of the country.

Key Challenges

The Accounts Payable process at Borosil group was manual intensive, fragmented, error prone and lacked visibility and control. The increase in the volume of invoices received everyday 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.

Borosil 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.

Borosil 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 shared services operations.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within the time

Borosil 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 Borosil 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 Borosil 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.

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 Borosil to automate invoice data capture and routing to SAP applications automatically, with minimal need for human intervention.

Borosil is now able to handle the exceptions and approval flows efficiently using the system-driven standardized business rules through workflow automation. OpenText VIM helped Borosil to significantly reduce their invoice processing cycle time with 68% invoices now being automatically processed and seamless integration with SAP.

Borosil is now able to maintain proper tax compliance with the help of GST compliance number checking in OpenText VIM. Real-time analytics and monitoring of invoices that are being processed provides Borosil with the necessary KPIs for continual process improvements. Furthermore, the digitized copies of invoices are being stored securely in the OpenText Archive Server and linked to SAP transactions for future reference which helps in eliminating the constant TO and FRO of the physical copy of invoices across different departments. With the implementation of VIM solution, Borosil has been able to consolidate their Accounts Payable process and can now efficiently process all their invoices through a Shared Service Centre.