Visy selects B2BE for purchase to pay automation [CASE STUDY]

Visy has selected B2BE for its purchase to pay automation. The B2BE solution for the Visy accounts payable automation consists of the joint deployment of the B2BE Transaction Delivery Network and the B2BE Document Digitization Service.

B2BE was so kind to give us a case study. Underneath is a summary. You can download the entire case study here.

About Visy

Visy started 1948 in Melbourne, Australia and has grown to one of the world’s largest privately owned packaging, paper and recycling companies. Visy employs around 5600 people operating from over 100 sites and generates more than $2.3 billion in revenue.

Through its products and services Visy serves various sectors including pharmaceutical, construction, dairy, fast-moving consumer goods, automotive, and building industries in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States.

Visy’s wants to be truly sustainable. A journey of continuous improvement, learning and adaptation success that depends on carefully balancing economic, environmental and social factors.

Visy’s purchase to pay challenge

Visy faced a number of issues in managing incoming invoices within the company’s accounts payable department:

• Every month Visy receives around 35,000 Purchase Order, financial invoices and statements.
• These documents come from more than 10,000 vendors and partners
• Visy receives these documents in hardcopy, facsimile or email attachment.
• The invoice information all had to be manually processed and delivered into a customised workflow approval system called IXOS.
• A staff of 32 people was responsible for this labour intensive task
• Within IXOS the authorisation and archiving of invoices takes place before accounts payable information is migrated to Visy’s back office system SAP.

The Solution

Visy decided to select B2BE for its accounts payable automation, because:

• B2BE had already proved itself as being the partner ‘who could, through past achievements, meet the desired outcome’.
• B2BE lived up to Visy’s requirements
• B2BE’s outsourcing model meant no upfront investment costs and that proved to be a very attractive ROI model for Visy.

Consisting of the following B2BE products: B2BE Transaction Delivery Network and B2BE Document Digitization Service. A closer look at the chosen combination of products reveals that:

• Within the B2BE solution for Visy all scanned accounts payable documents received by email, facsimile and hard copy are transmitted to the B2BE server.
• Subsequently B2BE executes a number of added value services for Visy.
• Through the deployment of the B2BE Document Digitization Services Invoices and Statements are digitised according to the key fields required to enable the upload into the Visy IXOS and ultimately the Visy SAP system for processing based on the supplier terms which also meet local tax authority requirements.
• Furthermore, validation is done on invoice type, vendor, site contact name and duplication in order to eliminate (data) errors.
• In the next step all invoices and statements are converted into an electronic format, placed into directories based on document type for further processing into Visy’s system.

B2BE also provide a range of business intelligent reporting to enable Visy to pro-actively manage the flow of data and documents between the Visy and B2BE environments and which provide error notifications and reporting to manage exception handling based on the pre-defined business validation rules B2BE applies on Visy’s behalf.

The Result

Through the use of the B2BE solutions for the accounts payable document automation project Visy realised positive results through cost reductions and business processes efficiencies. Through these results accounts payable personnel could be redeployed within the organisation to perform more add­ed value tasks.

The specific results:

• The costs for Invoice and Statement handling and management within accounts payable were reduced over 80%.
• Increased efficiencies led to faster document handling process.
• The time for document indexing was reduced to a maximum 24 hours after document receipt.
• Almost full elimination of data entry errors: keying of wrong amounts, invoice numbers, tax details and so on.
• Elimination of duplicate invoices processing.
• Vendors are made more accountable through early error detection via the B2BE validation processes, reducing work effort.
• Increased level of data accuracy.

Next steps

The next steps for Visy will be to start exchanging documents with a growing group of suppliers by EDI instead of e-mail, fax or hard copy. In this way the process can be completely automated on both ends in the supply chain so that not only Visy, but also their suppliers and partners can benefit from future cost reductions and business process improvement.

To find out more about B2BE and how they can help your organisation please visit B2BE or e-mail [email protected]