Case Study Accounts Payable Automation
RPA Bot Achieves up to 70% Decrease in Cost through Accounts Payable Automation
Our Client
BMG is Africa’s largest distributor, manufacturer and service provider of the highest quality engineering consumables and components; including
- Bearings & Seals
- Power Transmission Components
- Drives, Motors and Controllers
- Hydraulics, Pneumatics and Filtration
- Heavy and Light Duty Materials Handling
- Valves and Lubrication
- Fasteners, Gaskets and Tools
Reliably supplying and supporting 70 000 customers in 15 countries with the widest range of industrial engineered products and expert services in the Sub-Saharan region via 135 branches.
Customer problem
Within BMG’s accounts department, processing supplier invoices through the system involved a large amount of tedious manual work, including reading, validating, registering, and posting invoices.
The challenges faced by the Accounts Department was that the process was time consuming, with a lack of accuracy, and resulted in payment delays. Additionally there was no documented process and no exception management.
One of the accounts payable (AP) teams, which processes approximately 2,500+ invoices monthly for 70+ suppliers, was an ideal candidate for automation.
RPA solution
For BMG, an AP Automation solution removes processing bottleneck, secures an audit trail for compliance, and improves visibility throughout the organisation resulting in 100% visibility of the processes.
With Autom8’s Bot, the AP department automates and transforms the accounts payable process for better invoice management, empowering the business to derive more value per invoice. This results in process efficiencies, better control, and improved visibility over end-to-end invoice processing cycles to reach a new level of operational excellence.
As part of the implementation process the current Accounts Payable and Omni Channel Automated Order processes was mapped to illustrate where the RPA Bot role in the two processes.
Accounts Payable Process
Omni Channel Automated Order Process
- Additional benefits of the AP Automation Solution included:
- Streamline Invoice Processing to eliminate manual process inefficiencies through automated approval work-flows. Audit-trails, exception handling, invoice-PO matching and tight integration with business rules to ensure strict adherence.
- Convert documents into a processable format.
- Invoices received are digitized with the help of algorithms and validated with business rules for accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and accessibility.
- Bot flags any unusual or questionable invoices, bringing a human into the loop for exception handling.
- Data ingestion automation for exception handling reports and dashboards is included
- Trend analysis based on historical data streamlines the process even further.
Results
The client value delivered with the Accounts Payable automation process has resulted in BMG gaining significant benefits. The results achieved over a three-year period include:
- Up to 70% decrease in costs
- More than 95% improvement in efficiency – 70 seconds processing time per invoice
- 75% Time saved previously spent on manual work – 55,000 human hours saved.
