Global Manufacturer Automates A​P Work​flow with JobRouter and SAP integration

One of the world’s leading manufacturers of engines and power generation systems wanted to​ automate their accounts pay​able workflow process. Their current vendor invoice management process was 100% paper-based​​. The process had insufficient controls and was highly labor-intensive. In addition to the accounts payable staff , more than 600 employees worldwide were involved in supplier invoice approvals.

The impact of this cumbersome manual process reached across the organization - way beyond the jurisdiction of the accounting department. Furthermore, the company had undergone a number of acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures over the past 10 years​. ​As a result, this increased ​the operational complexity of their accounting processes. ​Finally, the company's international manufacturing, distribution and service model meant that their suppliers are located all over the world and deal in multiple currencies.

The company ​uses SAP as its ERP system​. SAP​ has stringent invoice input validation requirements that ​prevent​​ed the company from posting a significant number of invoices. Invoices were rejected for having incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect information when reconciled with purchase orders. As a result, there was no way to track the company’s invoice liability within SAP. Customizing SAP to ​address th​ose issues ​within their accounts payable workflow would have been very expensive and ​​​could have taken many months to implement.

The company was ​getting approximately 200 supplier invoices ​every day​. These invoice were all manually processed​. As a result, ​accounting staff were spending a lot of time tracking down errors and performing non-core tasks, rather than accounting functions. Al​so, ​accounts payable staff ​had to manually route the invoices ​for approvals using a variety of methods. 

Once the invoice left accounting, there was no consistent ​way to manage and track the approval procedures. Accounting staff spent a significant amount of their time checking on the progress and status of approvals​. They were also ​unable to provide vendors with the status of invoices in a timely manner. 

As a result, a large​ number of paper invoices were constantly in transit between departments and approvers, with no audit trail. The process also introduced the risk ​of incorrect or duplicate payments to vendors, late fees, inability to take advantage of early payment discounts, and potential liability issues.

A multi-day workshop was conducted to clearly define the AP workflows needed and to re-engineer and optimize the process. Because ​th​e comp​any had a the large number of invoice disputes, particular emphasis was placed on sub-processes for exception handling​ and ​​integration with SAP​.

​The JobRouter Digital Process Automation platform was chosen to develop a custom ​solution for their ​accounts ​payable workflow process for a number o​f reasons:

​First, JobRouter allowed rapid application development​ so a solution could be quickly deployed. The project was implemented within weeks, rather than the months it would have taken to customize SAP or integrate a third-party product.

Second, JobRo​uter​'s certified interface ​communicates with SAP systems​ to access data or execute transactions in SAP. These processes can be modeled independently of SAP. As a result, ​no SAP access is required for the involved users.

​​Finally, the newly implemented ​accounts ​payable workflow is completely automated and fully compliant with the company's legal and security requirements.

​​The company did not want to run the new A/P system on-premise.​ By choosing a cloud implementation, they placed their system in a state-of-the-art data center, managed and operated with the highest standards of security, compliance, and application availability.

A JobRouter partner further supports the company with added document conversion and management services. Invoices are physically picked up at the customer site on a daily basis and scanned, indexed, and stored for processing in their new JobRouter AP system.