Our Clients

Hindalco Industries Limited is the metals flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group. With a consolidated turnover of US$18.7 billion, Hindalco is an industry leader in aluminium and copper. In India, the company’s aluminium units across the country encompass the gamut of operations from bauxite mining, alumina refining, coal mining, captive power plants, and aluminium smelting to downstream rolling, extrusions, and foils. Today, Hindalco ranks among the global aluminium majors as an integrated producer, with a footprint in 9 countries outside India. Hindalco customers include key industry sectors like Building & Construction, Automotive, Packaging, Electrical, Consumer durables, Refractories, and Ceramics who purchase copper and aluminium items. Headquartered at Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The company has annual sales of US$15 billion and employs around 20,000 people. It is listed in the Forbes Global 2000 at 895th rank.

Process Overview: Bank Reconciliation

The manual bank reconciliation process was time consuming and prone to human errors at Hindalco.

• Varied and inconsistent format of bank statements, not meant to be accommodated directly to the book of accounts in Oracle
• All the payments made, and payments received were recorded in the Bank Statement.
• Book of accounts maintained in Oracle by Hindalco to match the transactions recorded in the Bank Statement.
• The transactions recorded in the bank statement were categorized as Block Payment, Individual Payment, Sweep-In, Sweep-Out transactions among others.
• Basis this segmentation the reconciliation rules between the Bank statement and Book of accounts maintained in Oracle, varies.
• In each event, the process team reconciles the Bank Statement with the transactions recorded in Book of accounts maintained in Oracle, and the NEFT report as a supporting document
• Consolidated transactions of a particular type, in the bank statement were to be reconciled against the records in the Book of accounts & NEFT report

Manual reconciliation not only resulted in delay but also influencedless visibility on fund flow and financial control. There was a need timely accounting process for all recordings and transactions adhering to regulations.

Process Overview: Performa Invoice Creation

• With 300+ customers, sending high number of PO’s daily for which invoice creation was time consuming, involved a lot of manual activity for approvals and validation
• Customers are categorized under export and domestic segments
• Hindalco customers raised a formal PDF-based purchase order or non-PO based material order via email
• For the received purchase order/material order (Export/Domestic), a Performa Invoice is created based on the PAR value validation for the requested material(s).
• Once the PI is created, it is mailed to the customer to take the material requisition process further to the next succeeding steps

Process Overview: Shipping Invoice Creation

There was need to automatically process the sales orders created, validating allocation for shipment, Lot allocation, delivery, shipment confirmation and generate invoice for shipping.

• Multiple purchase orders were created and processed daily.
• Purchase order creation initiated the dedicated sales and distribution process within Hindalco beginning from Sales Order creation, followed by Lot allocation and release.
• Shipping Confirmation/Invoicing is confirmed by Hindalco for the concerned purchase order raised by the customer.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within the time

Hindalco chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of the UiPath RPA solution. Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Hindalco to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, requirements, and created a roadmap for implementation, transition and change management. The workshops also covered all the aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Hindalco understand how they could leverage RPA to automate their multiple business processes. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document outlining the implementation scope.

Sidebar Information

Key Challenges

• Manage huge volume of transactions that were generated everyday
• Accounting multiple transactions toacceleratereconciliation & governance to enhance financial visibility
• Free text in transaction narration, made it difficult to identify the business transaction
• Need for automatic reconciliation between Bank statement and GL Statement by each line item as per the predefined reconciliation rules and update the status against each entry.
• Requirement of preparing and storing standard reports and sending out notifications to identified stakeholders in case of any exception
• Performa Invoice creation for high volume of Purchase orders daily
• Automating the process of sales order processing, all the way to delivery. Where the sequential processes involved were complex, recorded in disparate systems, picking up, validating allocation for shipment, lot and delivery, shipment confirmation and generate shipping invoices.

Solution Highlights

• Implementation of UiPath Attended bots for automation
• Timely notification to business users to monitor activities, exceptions, and triggers
• Automation of processes between disparate business systems, which were continuous and consistent
• Faster execution, error handling mechanisms with multiple systems defining a seamless approach for processing
• Automation of Voluminous transactions
  • Reconciling up to 35k line items in bank reconciliation,
  • Automated Performa invoice creation for every customer query
  • Automated Shipment Invoice creation, Lot allocation & Delivery order creation in a proper sequence, enabling seamless integration

Benefits

• For a 35000+ line-item reconciliation at one bank, the bot completed the action significantly faster than the existing manual operations.
• RPA helped in curtailing costs by reducing the errors in the reconciliation. Additionally, it also saved processing and audit costs.
• Performa invoice creation process is now immediate and concludes with generating a PDF document, ready to be shared with the customer
• Complete end to end automation of shipment process, with error handling and exception notification, right from allocation to shipment invoicing
• This automation resulted in effort savings of multiple full-time employees, error free and reduced dependency on human intervention.
• Improved process accuracy as the software bot performed all actions based on designated business rules without resulting in any processing errors.
• The solution also records activity logs, which can be audited to evaluate all transactions being performed by the bot. This helped them adhere to internal as well as external audits.

About Avaali:

Avaali Solutions (www.avaali.com) is a company that enables Enterprises to drive and deliver business results by leveraging digital technologies. Avaali has strengths in providing Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Enterprise Mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Avaali’s advisory, consulting and implementation services has enabled enterprises to transform their business processes and engage better with their stakeholders including customers, employees, partners, vendors and shareholders.

Oil India Limited (OIL), the premier Indian National Oil Company under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India today announced that it had gone live with its automation project for Supplier Collaboration and Accounts Payable Invoice Automation.

With this automation, OIL intends to deliver superior supplier engagement via the Avaali Velocious Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) solution. Additionally, invoices that come in via the Velocious SRM solution will seamlessly integrate with SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management to automate the invoice receipt to post-process.

As a part of this project, OIL has leveraged the Velociousvendor portal from Avaali, to provide a self-service platform to suppliersand enable them to maintain their profile, access Purchase Order details, generate and submitinvoices, track payment progress, and seamlessly communicate with users in OIL. The self-service portal is envisaged to drive convenience and satisfaction across the entire supplier baseof OIL.

The Invoice Automation solution will enable extraction and analysis of invoices that OIL receives from multiple sources. The solution will help OIL automate invoice verification and monitoring and easy access and retrieval of the invoice and supporting documents. Workflows will be fully automated, enabling audit trails, post which invoices will be posted.

This implementation will help OIL improve efficiencies, enhance productivity, eliminate process bottlenecks, and simplify operations. Additionally, this is intended to deliver excellent supplier relationships via a strong collaboration with OIL’s suppliers.

Commenting on this go-live, Shri Sushil Chandra Mishra, Chairman and Managing Director, Oil India Limited said, “As part of OIL’s digital journey, the invoice management process shall be standardized and the process workflow digitalized to improve team productivity and leverage process automation across the invoice management lifecycle through the Invoice to Pay solution”.

Ageas Federal leverages UI Path and Avaali to automate their collection reconciliation process to reduce human intervention, associated costs and improve efficiency.

The company is a joint venture between Ageas a multinational insurance giant based out of Europe, Federal Bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks and IDBI Bank, India’s premier development and commercial bank. Driven by growth and innovation the company continues to scale great heights and has achieved multiple milestones since its commencement in 2007. The company boasts of a good portfolio of product offering to its customers with wealth management, protection and retirement solutions.

Challenges at hand

Ageas Federal Life Insurance has been rapidly growing and has witnessed large trade transaction volumes combined with greater regulatory compliance demands.

The process of collection reconciliation is manual in nature, as it involves dealing with a big number of account types, payments, time zones and manually matching the transaction which makes the process complicated and exposes the business to operational errors and financial risks.

The company uses multiple banks and digital payment avenues for different processes and transactions which was one of the primary reconciliation challenges. The bank statements received for reconciliation are numerous and not very easy to compare with the internal records. Additionally, the data from external sources are in different formats and volumes to be matched are huge in nature. Hence there was a need for highly efficient preparation of bank statements for automated reconciliation and subsequent reporting of the reconciled results.

Ageas Federal Life Insurance explored various options and eventually chose to license and implement the UI Path RPA solution.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within time

Ageas Life Insurance chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of UI Path solution. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Ageas Life Insurance to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap. The workshops also covered all aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Ageas Federal life Insurance appreciate how they could leverage the UI Path Solution to gain higher efficiency in their bank reconciliation process. The implementation was completed in approximately 5 months. Avaali helped Ageas Federal Life Insurance to better perform complicated and time-consuming process of bank statement preparation for reconciliation and accurate reporting of the reconciled results.

Sidebar Information

Industry
Insurance

Customer
Ageas Life Insurance

Partner
Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Challenges

• There was a need to manage a huge volume of transactions that were generated per day.
• The complexity of business rules surrounding the reconciliation process
• Accurate preparation of banks statements for reconciliation
• Timely reporting of the reconciled results
• The process was required to be automated in such a way that it is consistent and comparable in order to provide reliable results.
• Managing multiple transactions in order to avoid complicating the whole reconciliation process.

Solutions

UI Path Robotic Process Automation Solution

Benefits

• UI Path Robotic Process Automation Solution
• Solution implementation in 5 months
• Better Bank statement preparation for reconciliation
• Accurate and timely reporting of reconciled results
• Reduction in time taken for the process, from 7-8 hours to 1 hour daily
• 1 FTE Savings

About Avaali

Avaali Solutions enables large enterprises to drive and deliver business results by leveraging digital technologies. Avaali has strengths in providing Enterprise Information Management, (EIM), Enterprise Mobility, RPA, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Avaali’s advisory, consulting and implementation services has enabled over 100+ enterprises globally to transform their operational and customer-facing processes.

Mediclinic Middle East operates seven hospitals in the UAE with over 900 inpatient beds, as well as more than 20 clinics in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Al Dhafra.

With its business expanding rapidly, Mediclinic Middle East realized that the pressure on its back office was rising. Keeping track of tens of thousands of invoices every year was a considerable challenge. The Accounts Payable process at Mediclinic was becoming increasingly fragmented, manually intensive, error-prone and cumbersome.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within time:

Mediclinic chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of Kofax ReadSoft PD AP solution. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Mediclinic to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap. The workshops also covered all aspects of the proposed solution in detail, to help Mediclinic appreciate how they could leverage the Kofax ReadSoft PD AP solution to resolve their needs around invoice processing and archiving incoming vendor invoices. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document covering Kofax ReadSoft PD AP solution business scenarios and gained the acceptance and confidence of Mediclinic business and IT team. Avaali also took ownership of educating the Mediclinic end users as well as IT users, about the solution and thus eased change management.

Sidebar Information

Industry
Healthcare

Customer
Mediclinic Middle East

Partner
Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Challenges

• Lack of digitisation and electronic movement of documents
• No standardized business rules to manage P2P and Vendor Payments. User driven business rules for invoice approval and processing.
• Long, costly and error prone Invoice Processing Cycle
• Offline correspondence and approvals in AP that are not documented or recorded in the system.
• Lack of visibility on invoice status and bottlenecks.
• Need for configuration of multiple scan stations for hard-copy invoices
• Need for configuration of E-mail channel for invoices via E-mail
• Need for capturing invoice capture data without titles and validate the data after it was pushed into SAP

Solutions

• Kofax ReadSoft PD AP Solution
• Kofax ReadSoft Invoices
• Kofax ReadSoft Collector
• Kofax ReadSoft PD Web Application
• Kofax ReadSoft PD Mobile Application

Benefits

• Ability to process more than 1,10,000 invoices per year and consolidation of distributed invoice processing.
• Reduced invoice cycle time, error and cost and reduced invoice cycle time significantly.
• Automated handling of various invoice types including PO and Non-PO invoices, Credit & Debit Note invoices, Down Payment Requests and Freight handling invoices.
• Efficient document processing configuration to cover dashboard indexing, master data checks on incoming invoices, price and quantity discrepancy checks and handling duplicated invoices.
• Better reporting due to implementation of custom reports such as invoice lifecycle, AP Account overview etc.
• Standard AP process across the organization for better governance and compliance.
• Higher satisfaction of suppliers and internal stakeholders
• No ‘Paper Tourism’. Easy to share documents
• All the approvals – audit trails including offline approvals

About Avaali

Avaali Solutions is niche technology vendor specializing in digital business operations. The company helps enterprises to consolidate, standardize and automate their operational processes such as Procurement, Sourcing, Supply Chain, HR, Legal/Contracts, Order to Cash processes, financial processes etc. The company has executed over 150+ shared services transformation by leveraging their consulting practice strongly tied in with their tech practice to implement automation solutions such as Enterprise Content Management, Packaged applications for accounts payable, Robotic Process Automation, OCR, Information Management solutions and AI Chatbot solutions. Their customers are large enterprises; they work with customers across industries as most operational processes are largely common.

About Mediclinic

Mediclinic International (www.Mediclinic.com) is an international private hospital group with operations in UAE, South Africa, Namibia and Switzerland. It has over USD 4 billion in revenues with more than 33,000 employees.

Medclinic Middle East operates seven hospitals in the UAE with over 900 inpatient beds, as well as more than 20 clinics in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Al Dhafra.

Manipal Hospitals leverages RPA solution to automate their Bank reconciliation and cash application processes to reduce manual efforts, associated costs and to improve efficiency.

Manipal Health was facing challenge around its bank reconciliation process as it was a monthly activity with manual process. Manipal wanted to move to daily recon frequency to have better control on banking transactions but it was requiring dedicated manpower at each unit. Another challenge, which Manipal was facing, was around accounts receivable settlement in Books. The existing process of cash application (invoice wise allocation of collection in Hospital system) was manual in nature and was consuming considerable time and efforts.

Implementation of RPA solution

Manipal Hospitals chose to go with RPA solution for above challenges. The implementation team conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Manipal Hospitals to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap. The workshops also covered all aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Manipal appreciate how they could leverage the UI Path Solution for faster cash application process and gain higher efficiency in their bank reconciliation process. The implementation was completed in around 5 months. Avaali helped Manipal Hospitals to better perform the complicated and time-consuming cash application and bank reconciliation processes.

Al-Futtaim Group leverages OpenText and Avaali to manage data growth and compliance, document management.

Established in the 1930s as a trading business, Al-Futtaim Group today is one of the most diversified and progressive, privately held regional businesses headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Structured into five operating divisions; automotive, financial services, real estate, retail and health; employing more than 42,000 employees across more than 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, we partner with over 200 of the world’s most admired and innovative brands.

Al-Futtaim Group’s entrepreneurship and relentless customer focus enables the organisation to continue to grow and expand; responding to the changing needs of its customers within the societies in which the Group operates.

Addressing the challenges of rapid SAP data growth and meet Statutory Compliance

Al-Futtaim Group has seen immense business growth over the past number of years and expects to have substantial growth in the upcoming years. Al-Futtaim Group was keen to transform its organization to a complete paperless organization, including their Retail and Auto Sales operations.

Al-Futtaim Group explored options for archiving and document migration solutions of SAP using OpenText for its ECC systems with the goals to keep the production database lean, increase performance and improve business efficiency in order to increase performance, reduce maintenance windows & system administration costs, implement compliant long term data storage mechanisms and also meet industry standards from a statutory and regulatory perspective. Al-Futtaim required a balance between risk and legal compliance by managing data volumes and retention requirements.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within time

Al-Futtaim Group chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of Open Text Archiving and Document Migration for SAP. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Al-Futtaim Group to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap. The workshops also covered all aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Al Futtaim appreciate how they could leverage the Archival Solution proposed to resolve their regulatory and compliance needs apart from finding the scalable archival system for their rapidly growing data. Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document covering the archival plan, then gained the acceptance and confidence of Al-Futtaim Group business and IT team. Avaali team also migrated documents from SAP database to OpenText archive centre. Avaali also took ownership of educating the IT teams about the solution and thus eased change management.

Al-Futtaim Group has implemented Document Migration and Data Archiving for its retail as well as auto sales function.

• Migration of documents of 1.2 TB size from SAP Database to OpenText Archive Centre.
• Single source for all archived documents and seamless access to archived documents from SAP transactions.
• Enablement of users to meet statutory compliance by storing documents in a secure and unalterable form.
• Master data archiving for article master
• Analysing and assisting in closing open items leading to comprehensive data archiving
• In addition to document migration and article master archiving, Al-Futtaim Group undertook archiving additional objects related to finance in their retail and auto functions.
• Reduce database size of approx. 2.5 TB size from the article master archiving implementation.

The OpenText Data Archiving solution allows them to archive all older data into an external archive server and delete corresponding records from the SAP database. Al-Futtaim Group has implemented data archiving for technical object (application logs, info structures etc.) as well as master data object (material/article masters) which had multiple prerequisites and business complete rules.

This has yielded a reduction in database size and improved system performance, reduced backup times and reduced storage costs. The organization is now able to comply with statutory requirement by keeping only 1 year of data in the database.

Sidebar Information

Industry
Property, Retail, Leisure & Entertainment, Automotive

Customer
Al-Futtaim Group

Partner
Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Challenges

• Increasing Database Size
• High online, tier-1 storage costs and system administration costs
• Declining SAP application performance
• Increase in maintenance windows.
• Requirement of compliant, long term data storage mechanisms.
• Need of meeting industry standards from a statutory and regulatory perspective.
• Scope of improvement in business efficiency

Solutions

OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP

Benefits

• Uphold Statutory Compliance while maintaining SAP DB growth
• Reduction in storage costs using a multi-tier data storage and retention strategy
• Reduction in system administration and costs
• Transaction process improvements
• Store Correspondence type documents and orders

About Avaali

Avaali Solutions is a specialist in enabling organizations to leverage digital technologies to manage their internal business processes as well as engage better with their ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors etc.). Avaali has done over 120+ transformations for large enterprises across Asia, MEA and Europe to help them reduce cost and deliver better business outcomes via digital. The company specializes in Sourcing, Procurement and Shared Service process automation.

Apollo Tyres leveraged OpenText Vendor Invoice Management to automate invoice processing.

Apollo Tyres Limited is an Indian multinational tyre manufacturing company headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana. It was incorporated in 1972, and its first plant was commissioned in Perambra, Thrissur, Kerala, India. The company now has five manufacturing units in India, one in Netherlands and one in Hungary. It has a network of nearly 5,000 dealerships in India, of which over 2,500 are exclusive outlets.

Key Challenges

The Accounts Payable process at Apollo Tyres was manual intensive, fragmented, error prone and lacked visibility and control. The increase in the volume of invoices received every day at various locations led to challenges brought about by decentralized processing such as miscommunications, delayed payments and lack of divisional control.

Due to the movement of physical copy of invoices through different departments, tracking the current status of incoming invoices waiting to be processed versus already processed invoices became a significant task. There were challenges of visibility into real time pending liabilities and invoice processing status. Invoices and supporting documents were not digitally integrated with SAP transactions, which created problems at the time of audit and tax assessment. Manual processing and non-standard approval policies posed challenges in terms of high cycle time, process inefficiency, lack of proper trails and compliance.

Additionally, the process of handling the accounting of import licenses was extremely time taking, manual and tedious. The cycle time for processes like CHA handling and reimbursement bills processing were high and required streamlining.

There was requirement of digitally capturing all offline correspondence and approvals in Account Payable workflows.

Apollo wanted digitalization of all the incoming invoices which were previously being received as hard copies, a system driven business rule validation of incoming vendor invoice data and customized approval matrix for invoice approval based on the amount, type of procurement and location.

There was also a need for real-time analytics dashboard and out-of-the-box slice and dice reports, that could improve process visibility in Apollo.

Apollo explored various options and eventually chose to implement the SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution to achieve faster invoice processing from scanning to posting. With these solutions, they achieved higher productivity and better visibility on their invoice processing cycle.

Partnering with Avaali to implement a solution efficiently and well within the time

Apollo chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of SAP OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Apollo to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, requirements, and created a roadmap for implementation, transition and change management. The workshops also covered all the aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Apollo understand how they could leverage the solution to resolve their current Invoice processing challenges. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document covering invoice and payment approval scenarios under the implementation scope. With the support of the Apollo team, the implementation of the solution was completed in 8 months.

Additional Automation solution leads to significant benefits

OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution comes with best-in-class scanning and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application. The OCR application is equipped with intelligent text recognition engine that can support any type of invoice template and data format. This enables Apollo to automate invoice data capture and routing to SAP applications automatically, with minimal need for human intervention.

Apollo is now able to handle the exceptions and approval flows efficiently using the system-driven standardized business rules through workflow automation. OpenText VIM helped Apollo to significantly reduce their invoice processing cycle time with majority of the invoices now being automatically processed and seamless integration with SAP. Real-time analytics and monitoring of invoices that are being processed provides Apollo with the necessary KPIs for continual process improvements.

With the implementation of VIM solution, Apollo has been able to consolidate their Accounts Payable process and can now efficiently process all their invoices.

Challenges

• High invoice processing cycle time with manual data entry, validation and approval process
• Distributed invoice processing with no clear visibility of invoice processing status
• Traceability of Invoices during the time of Audits and Tax Assessments
• User-driven business rules, invoice approval and payment processes leading to compliance issues
• Tax compliance challenges related to GST and E-Invoicing

Solutions

• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP® Solutions
• OpenText™ Business Capture Centre
• OpenText™ Archiving for SAP® Solutions

Sidebar Information

Industry
Tyres Manufacturing

Customer
Apollo Tyres Limited

Partner
Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Benefits

• Processing of 2.6 lakh invoices annually
• Elimination of Manual data entry & associated errors with OCR
• Consolidation of distributed invoice processing across all its location.
• Centralized verification of invoices with system-driven business rules and approval process
• 360-degree view of Invoice processing with real-time dashboard and out-of-the-box reports
• Better Governance and Compliance
• Early visibility to liabilities to ensure compliance to vendor payments.
• Real-time reporting for both invoice and payment processing and availability of customer specific reporting which gives comprehensive view on volumes, issues, liabilities etc

About Avaali

Avaali Solutions is a specialist in enabling organizations to leverage digital technologies to manage their internal business processes as well as engage better with their ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors etc.). Avaali has done over 120+ transformations for large enterprises across Asia, MEA and Europe to help them reduce cost and deliver better business outcomes via digital. The company specializes in Sourcing, Procurement and Shared Service process automation.

About Apollo

Apollo Tyres Limited is an Indian multinational tyre manufacturing company headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana. It was incorporated in 1972, and its first plant was commissioned in Perambra, Thrissur, Kerala, India. The company now has five manufacturing units in India, one in Netherlands and one in Hungary. It has a network of nearly 5,000 dealerships in India, of which over 2,500 are exclusive outlets.

To learn more about Apollo Tyres visit: https://www.apolloindustries.com/

Bidco Africa Reference Letter – Know more.

Enterprises are looking to significantly accelerate process agility and reduce costs. Operational efficiency is one of the most sought after agenda to bounce back to recovery.

See how Bidco Africa, a multi-national consumer goods company headquartered in Kenya achieved this with OpenText xECM. 50% reduction for Due Payment approval process, 40% reduction for reconciliation processes, 50% for accounts receivable process and 70% for Master Data creation process – the power of the solution is in the way it is implemented and adopted.

Accounts Payable Automation with OpenText Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) – Know more.

Customer Profile

• 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”.

OpenText Extended ECM for document management and content enriched SAP business processes – Know more.

Customer Profile

• 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:

Across their shared services business process like Accounts Receivable, payment approval, master data creation etc., Bidco has several challenges such as:

• Non-availability of supportings when required during an audit
• Unstructured content relating to a process delinked from SAP transactions
• Lack of a structured approach to document and records management.
• Bidco had various business documents in the form of paper. Handling paper through the approval process was cumbersome and it was a challenge for them to search for the relevant information in case of any business needs.

Collectively, this led to inefficient processes, consequent loss of productivity, increased costs and high risks with respect to governance and compliance.

Solution Highlights

• Consulting engagement from Avaali to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap.
• OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions to enable Bidco to create and maintain SAP master data for Vendor, Customer, Material, Asset and Employee objects.
• Integrate OpenText Vendor Invoice Management with OpenText Extended ECM Solution to digitize incoming invoices and store them in Extended ECM repository
• Avaali has implemented a solution using OpenText Extended ECM, to enable Bidco to create and maintain SAP master data for Vendor, Customer, Material, Asset and Employee objects.
• The implementation was split into 5 phases in order to better suit the business as well as to ease change management. Implementation of the 1st phase of the core OpenText Extended ECM implementation was completed in just 4.5 months. All the five phases together with required custom developments and migration from the legacy system was delivered in 8.5 months.

Benefits:

• Bidco has integrated SAP Procurement, Sales, FI and HR business process with OpenText Extended ECM to standardize and streamline its core business process by enriching them with document management functionality. With this solution, they have significantly brought down their cycle time to process and now got a greater visibility and accountability of their processes.
• Bidco has leveraged OpenText Enterprise Scan solution and ECM functionality to automate their Accounts Receivable, Bank Reconciliation, Vendor Reconciliation, Customer Reconciliation and Due Payment approval process. With automation, Bidco has streamlined these processes and significantly reduced the cycle time.
• With the implementation of xECM for managing Master Data, they are now able to maintain high quality, accurate master data in SAP with a multi-level approval cycle for creation of master data. By attaching the supporting documents with the master data, it is now easy to audit in case of any issues.
• With the integration of OpenText VIM with xECM, Bidco is now able to access VIM invoices from Extended ECM interface and is able to apply retention rules on those invoices
• Bidco has replaced its existing document management system and migrated those documents into Extended ECM repository. All those documents are now stored securely and can be accessed and searched easily.

Customer Quote:

Alkane Patel, Head of IT at Bidco said “As a result of this implementation, we have a 360-degree visibility into any and all content associated with transactions in SAP. All our contents are now securely stored in a centralized repository thus avoiding silos and gives us the flexibility to access our content from different sources via preferred user interfaces. With document centric business process workflows being implemented, we are able reduce cycle time by 50% for Due Payment Approval process, 40% for Reconciliation process, 50% for Accounts Receivable Process, 70% for Master Data Creation process and enabled the business and management to have better control over the whole process and faster decisions. With Extended ECM Scan solution, Bidco is able to digitize most of the physical documents and thus minimizing dependency on physical documents”.

OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for Tata Sky. – Know more.

Customer Quote:

• One of India’s largest Media/DTH Companies.
• Over 10 million subscribers with coverage for over 36,000 towns across India.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• No central location of receiving and processing invoices, hence no clear picture about pending liabilities and bottlenecks.
• Lot of offline correspondence and approvals in AP that are not documented or recorded in the system.
• Non-standard business rules for invoice approval and processing.
• Periodic reporting and reconciliation was problematic.
• Many issues in handling 3-way matching and associated exceptions.
• No digitization of invoices and associated documents.

Solution Highlights:

• Advisory services to design and setup SSC for AP/P2P operations, including handling transportation invoices.
• Implemented OpenText Vendor Invoice Management including Invoice Capture Center for OCR.
• Solution cut across various departments with order to pay process variations for post-facto and pre-facto invoicing.
• Solution catered to various invoices sizes with huge number of supporting documents.
• DMS setup for both AP and non-AP documents.

Benefits:

• Lower invoice cycle time from 7 to 2 days.
• Reduction of FTE in AP by 3 people in < 1 month.
• Scalability to process 4x growth in invoices.
• Improved visibility over current liabilities and AP process bottlenecks.

Shared Service Center Automation

Customer Profile:

• diversified conglomerate with operations in over 30 countries.
• strong presence in more than 100 markets around the world.
• Over USD 600 million in revenues 7500+ employees.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Remote locations in India and abroad where paper documents where processed.
• No digitization and electronic movement of documents.
• No standardized business rules to manage P2P and O2C processes.
• Lack of visibility on process status and bottlenecks.
• Error prone vendor invoice processing and no way to identify duplicates.
• No standard payment authorization process.
• Remittance matching and cash allocation issues.
• High cost per document.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Advisory services – identified current issues and recommended SSC best practices.
• Evaluated best of breed technology vendors and recommended the best fit.
• Implemented scan & OCR solution to digitize vendor invoices, customer orders, customer payment advices, cheques etc.
• Implemented AP, AR & Sales Order business rules, exception handling and workflows.
• Touchless processing capabilities.

Benefits :

• Reduced invoice cycle time and errors.
• Reduced DSO.
• High volume processing without increasing AP & AR headcounts.
• Complete digitization and paperless office.
• Improved visibility over current liabilities, open customer invoices and process bottlenecks.

OpenText Vendor Invoice Management

Customer Profile:

• One of India’s largest oil and gas PSU
• Location: Mumbai
• $40 billion company
• Has been ranked 229th in the Fortune Global 500 rankings of the world’s biggest corporations for the year 2013

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Time-consuming paper process and no digitization of invoices.
• Lower insight of Vendor Liability and less visibility in tracking status of invoices.
• Increase in invoice cycle time.

Solution Highlights:

Implemented OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution:

• Created workforce efficiencies through an automated and streamlined process.
• Improved working capital management through better visibility to cash requirements.
• Cut costs through automated data extraction, process automation and control including shared services.
• Reduced costly manual errors.
• Optimized cash discount utilization including dynamic discounting.

Benefits :

• Enable more accurate financial reporting through complete visibility.
• Segregated duties through workflow control.
• Monitor across all steps of the invoice process.
• Lower invoice cycle time.
• Provide complete audit trail.

Implementation of Extended Enterprise Content Management

Customer Profile:

• Established in 1942.
• $1.6 billion company.
• Manufactures paints for decorative and industrial use.
• Asia’s third largest paint company, the group operates around the world through its subsidiaries.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Information Silos between business content and transactional data.
• No single folder structure to access process specific data.
• No document management, retention system-poor visibility and process controls.
• Leverage the value of information by providing business users access to all relevant document.
• Balance between TCO, risk and legal compliance by managing, data volumes, retention requirements and destruction.

Solution Highlights :

• Implemented OpenText Extended Enterprise Content Management for SAP solution.
• Bringing digital content across processes in reference to business context.
• Access to all business-relevant information via preferred user interface(SAP GUI, MS Office, MS Windows, E-Mail Client, Web UI).
• Configured workflows for business specific requirement including design of 5S Checklist and KAIZEN Workflow in XECM.
• Custom Configuration of xECM w.r.t Plant Maintenance Functionality.

Benefits :

• 360 degree view on processes and business objects by linking of SAP data and non-SAP content.
• Users view the documents using preferred UI.
• Workspaces allow folder based approach of categorizing content and business data.
• Ability to make better decisions because of increases visibility of business process.
• Long term storage mechanisms that helped meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Implementation of HR Document Management

Customer Profile:

• Established in 1911.
• $ 3 billion company.
• Part of India’s of the most respected business houses.
• India’s largest private power generation company.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• A paper heavy and cumbersome HR process for receiving, verifying and retrieving employee documents.
• A very high storage and maintenance cost of physical copies of employee documents.
• Integration with SAP UI5 interface.

Solution Highlights :

• Implemented OpenText Employee File Management solution.
• Digitalization of all employee related records.
• Configure workflow for receiving, verifying and approving the employee documents.
• Provide HR admins and employees access to HRA and ESS portals.
• Setup OpenText components like desktop link and exchange link for archiving the documents from directly from desktop and e-mail.

Benefits :

• complete management of all employee document.
• immediate availability of digital personnel files to all users.
• faster and more efficient work in HR Departments.
• less time for filling and searching.
• no copying and distribution of paper files.
• less storage space needed.
• complete and seamless integration into SAP HCM.

OpenText Vendor Invoice Management Implementation

Customer Profile:

• Founded in 1916, listed among the leading FMCGs of the world.
• Location: US, Bangalore.
• With over $3.86 Billion net revenue, stands as one of the leaders in the US retail market.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Poor Vendor relations and market credibility.
• Missing Discount opportunities.
• Difficulty preparing accruals.
• Excessive invoice processing cost.

Solution Highlights :

• Streamline Accounts Payable operations.
• Simplify and automate invoice processing.
• Implemented standardized process with invoice exception blocking and workflow.
• Improved visibility of invoice statuses and improved invoice processing efficiency.

Benefits :

• Reduced invoice processing cost and invoice processing time.
• Better visibility and traceability of invoices through advance workflow capabilities.
• Significant drop in the percentage of overdue invoices.
• Better vendor discounts and higher credit ratings-improved vendor negotiations.

OpenText Vendor Invoice Management Implementation

Customer Profile:

• One of Australia’s largest diversified media companies.
• Founded in 1841, and headquartered in Sydney.
• With over A$2.34 Billion net revenue, stands as one of the leaders in the media industry.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Poor visibility and lack of audit trail – limited insights and reporting.
• Complex user control and access management framework and policy requirements for invoice approvals.
• Non standard 3 way matching and 2 way matching.
• Processing of Condition vendors.

Solution Highlights :

• Implementation of OpenText Vendor Invoice management to streamline the Accounts Payable process.
• Built complex workflows which adhered to a complex framework of user access management and approval framework.

Benefits :

• More reliable and standardized invoice processing.
• Higher accuracy and reliability in providing insights into invoice data.
• Easy change management-native SAP look and feel.
• Satisfies the core business need to enable complex role-based approval of invoices.

OpenText Invoice Capture Center Implementation

Customer Profile:

• Largest Liquified Natural Gas producer in the world.
• Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
• Produces 42 Million tonnes per anum.
• Contributes 60% of Country’s GDP.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• AP Operations across the enterprise was manual and not integrated to the ERP.
• Manual routing & archiving process, data is manually entered into the SAP system.
• Error prone, inaccurate & delayed process due to manual verification & checklist documentation.
• Slow scanning & archiving process thru manual scanning for hardcopies of invoices and invoices receiving over emails.

Solution Highlights :

• Implemented OpenText Invoice capture centre, Kofax VRS & OpenText Enterprise Scan.
• Enabled Archiving & OCR to process invoices received physically and via email.
• Built Multiple OCR applications to be able to segregate AP process for invoices received from different channels and countries.
• Setup Scanning across the organization to provide high quality of scans suitable for high accuracy OCR.

Benefits :

• Automated recognition of data and line items in the Invoices drastically reduced invoice cycle time.
• Reliable and standardized invoice data capture and processing.
• Digitization of all invoice types with ability to differentiate between invoices & supportings.

SAP Data Archiving

Customer Profile:

• India’s largest private sector company in the Diary industry.
• Location: Chennai.
• $36.7 billion Revenue.
• Dairy ingredients exported to 38 countries in the American, Middle East and South East Asian Market.
• Future expansion plans to strengthen global presence, ISO 9001:2000 Certified.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Rapid business growth, resulting in large database, reduced performance & elevated administration costs & increased downtime during upgrade.
• Reduce database size, archive business complete data.
• Reduce administration, operation cost, System downtime during maintenance & Upgrade activities.
• Improve system performance & facilitate smooth operations.
• Keen on upgrading SAP environment to cater to the growing business expansions and their requirements, but wanted to reduce upgrade time and complexity.

Solution Highlights :

• Identified & Standardized archiving policy for all business data and put in place a long term archiving blueprint and strategy.
• Automated data archiving processes for all business complete data.
• Categorized archived data for long term storage.
• Developed various access mechanisms for end user access to archived data.

Benefits :

• Long term cost effective secured storage, retrieval and management of archived data.
• Significantly Reduced operational & administration costs.
• Significantly Reduced downtimes during maintenance & upgrade activities.
• Reduced database size and Improved system performance.
• Effective and smooth business operations.

SAP Data Archiving with OpenText

Customer Profile:

• Founded in 1974.
• #1 in India for Anti-infective segment.
• Location: Mumbai.
• Has 28 brands with sales of over $2 million.
• Footprints in more than 35 countries.
• 11 Brands are listed among top 300 brands in India.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Extensive business growth resulting in large database, reduced performance & elevated administration costs.
• Manage long-term database expansion resulting from organic growth, new software releases.
• Unified & Compliant Information management scenario to store archived information in a Safe and secure low cost storage environment.
• Deployments with high availability, replication, and distribution to protect against the loss of valuable business information and provide efficient disaster recovery.

Solution Highlights :

• Implemented OpenText archiving solution with integration to SAP.
• Implemented SAP Data Archiving solution covering business and technical data.
• Developed automation for periodic archive runs.
• Put in place long term retention mechanisms.
• Facilitated user access to both production and archived content in unified views.

Benefits :

• Reduced hardware storage costs through data compression and the ability to leverage lower-cost media.
• Minimized the need for additional hardware.
• Provided greater system availability and reduced downtimes.
• Significantly Improved SAP application performance.
• Ensured that regulatory compliance requirements were met around data storage.