OpenText Extended ECM for document management and content enriched SAP business processes – Know more.
Customer Profile:

bidco-logo

  • Bidco Africa Ltd. is a multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Kenya with over 48 different brands and distributorships across 17 countries in the East, Central and Southern African regions.
  • – Their products include Edible Oils, Cooking Fats, Margarine, Baking Products, Hygiene Products, Detergents, Laundry Bars and Animal Feeds.
  • The Group operates factories across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Madagascar. The company reaches over 350 million consumers across Africa.

Challenges & Opportunities:

Across their shared services business process like Accounts Receivable, payment approval, master data creation etc., Bidco has several challenges such as:

  • Non-availability of supportings when required during an audit
  • Unstructured content relating to a process delinked from SAP transactions
  • Lack of a structured approach to document and records management.
  • Bidco had various business documents in the form of paper. Handling paper through the approval process was cumbersome and it was a challenge for them to search for the relevant information in case of any business needs.

Collectively, this led to inefficient processes, consequent loss of productivity, increased costs and high risks with respect to governance and compliance.

Solution Highlights:

  • Consulting engagement from Avaali to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap.
  • OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions to enable Bidco to create and maintain SAP master data for Vendor, Customer, Material, Asset and Employee objects.
  • Integrate OpenText Vendor Invoice Management with OpenText Extended ECM Solution to digitize incoming invoices and store them in Extended ECM repository
  • Avaali has implemented a solution using OpenText Extended ECM, to enable Bidco to create and maintain SAP master data for Vendor, Customer, Material, Asset and Employee objects.
  • The implementation was split into 5 phases in order to better suit the business as well as to ease change management. Implementation of the 1st phase of the core OpenText Extended ECM implementation was completed in just 4.5 months. All the five phases together with required custom developments and migration from the legacy system was delivered in 8.5 months.

Benefits:

  • Bidco has integrated SAP Procurement, Sales, FI and HR business process with OpenText Extended ECM to standardize and streamline its core business process by enriching them with document management functionality. With this solution, they have significantly brought down their cycle time to process and now got greater visibility and accountability of their processes.
  • Bidco has leveraged OpenText Enterprise Scan solution and ECM functionality to automate their Accounts Receivable, Bank Reconciliation, Vendor Reconciliation, Customer Reconciliation and Due Payment approval process. With automation, Bidco has streamlined these processes and significantly reduced the cycle time.
  • With the implementation of xECM for managing Master Data, they are now able to maintain high quality, accurate master data in SAP with a multi-level approval cycle for the creation of master data. By attaching the supporting documents with the master data, it is now easy to audit in case of any issues.
  • With the integration of OpenText VIM with xECM, Bidco is now able to access VIM invoices from the Extended ECM interface and is able to apply retention rules on those invoices
  • Bidco has replaced its existing document management system and migrated those documents into the Extended ECM repository. All those documents are now stored securely and can be accessed and searched easily.

Customer Quote:

Alkane Patel, Head of IT at Bidco said “As a result of this implementation, we have 360-degree visibility into any and all content associated with transactions in SAP. All our contents are now securely stored in a centralized repository thus avoiding silos and gives us the flexibility to access our content from different sources via preferred user interfaces. With document-centric business process workflows being implemented, we are able to reduce cycle time by 50% for Due Payment Approval process, 40% for Reconciliation process, 50% for Accounts Receivable Process, 70% for Master Data Creation process and enabled the business and management to have better control over the whole process and faster decisions. With Extended ECM Scan solution, Bidco is able to digitize most of the physical documents and thus minimizing dependency on physical documents”.