Accounts Payable Automation with OpenText Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) – 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:

  • Their Shared Service Center has seen tremendous growth in the past years and maintaining the productivity of the SCC team emerged as a key test for the organization.
  • Keeping track of received invoices versus processed invoices was a challenge making it difficult to know with accuracy the pending liabilities at any given time.
  • Invoices and associated documents were not digitally integrated with SAP and there was a need to digitally capture all offline correspondence and approvals in Account payable workflows.
  • No system driven standardized approval matrix for invoice approval and processing that would improve 3-way matching, associated exceptions & Invoice approvals.
  • Improving productivity for the overall process and efficiency in periodic reporting and reconciliation

Solution Highlights:

  • Consulting from Avaali to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap.
  • SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management and Invoice Capture Center solution to achieve faster, touchless invoice processing from scanning to posting.
  • OpenText Enterprise Scan solution to digitize incoming invoices
  • OpenText Invoice Capture Center to automatically capture the invoice details
  • Avaali also took ownership of educating the Bidco users and IT about the solution and thus eased change management. The overall implementation was completed in just 3.5 months

Benefits:

  • With this solution, Bidco is now able to automate and increase efficiency by using automated invoice data capture and routing to SAP applications automatically, with minimal need for human intervention.
  • Bidco is able to handle the exceptions and approval flows efficiently using the system-driven standardized business rules and through workflow automation.
  • Bidco can now do approvals through mobile and web portal. Furthermore, the digitized copies of invoices are being stored in the OpenText Archive Server and linked to the invoice document in SAP for future reference.
  • With the implementation of VIM solution, Bidco has been able to consolidate their AP process and now process efficiently all their invoices through a Shared Service Center.

Customer Quote:

Alkane Patel, Head of IT at Bidco said “As a result of this implementation, we have been able to reduce our invoice processing time significantly by 75-85%, it is now down to 1-2 days from an earlier 7-day invoice processing cycle time. We have also now achieved about 55% touchless invoice processing within 4 months of the go-live of the VIM solution. Using VIM reports, we have a good visibility on the liabilities and bottlenecks, thus enabling the business and management to have better control over the whole process and faster decisions. With this solution Avaali has implemented standardized invoice processing rules across locations, thus enabling better governance of the end to end process”.