American Multinational Conglomerate: Automating Invoice Processing

This was being done to reduce the turnaround time during volatility of process volumes. Client’s management believed that automation could help solve these problems and asked TAO to develop the business case.

TAO partnered with the client to come up with an intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution to assess the benefits of RPA and design an automated solution to increase the efficiency and reduce the overall processing cost.

The key objectives of automating this B2P process were:

• Lowering the overall cost of processing invoices.
• Meeting Service Levels for Invoices Paid on Time (POT).
• Avoiding double payment of invoices.
• Avoiding fraud and meeting compliance requirements.

TAO looked at the various aspects of the existing process and recommended the following approach to automating the process:

• Take a fully automated approach for B2P invoice processing which involves reading of each invoice using an intelligent OCR solution to capture data from the invoice and structure it according to the business requirement.
• The intelligent OCR solution was used in combination with RPA bots. Bots were used to interact with various workflow and ERP environments
• Scope of the project was to automate the B2P process for 36 business entities having a total volume of 250,000 invoices per year.
• Majority of the vendors were Indian vendors, and a few were international vendors.

TAO team delivered the following:

• Scope of automation – end to end automation of B2P process.
• Effort analysis and Implementation Plan of 14 weeks.
• Process design document with Solution approach, AS-IS and TO-BE process workflows with Technical Design Documents.
• Configured the automation solution, including interactions and interfaces between various components.
• Added validation checks to ensure independence, accuracy and completeness.
• Support for on-boarding into production.

Business Benefits Delivered:
Compelling benefits from RPA that were proven in the pilot include:

• Redeployment of 12-14 FTE.
• 80% faster processing with significant improvement in process turnaround time.
• 90% average OCR accuracy.
• 90% transactions automated.
• SLA compliance reduced from 3-7 days for the manual process to 1-day for the automated process
• Productivity improvements, including reduced manual controls, higher quality invoice processing and lowering the error rate.

The client is now in a position to roll-out the automation of the entire B2P process in scope on the basis of this assessment and its demonstrated business case.

For more information on this assessment case please write to us at [email protected]