Australian packaging giant Visy has automated its extensive accounts payable department that deals with over 10,000 vendors via a solution from Australia’s Business to Business E-Solutions (B2BE).

Richard Xuereb, Visy Corporate National Manager Shared Services Payable Division for Visy was facing a number of issues around the management of incoming invoices within the company’s accounts payable department.

Every month Visy received around 35,000 Purchase Order and financial invoices and statements from more than 10,000 vendors and partners in hardcopy and other receipt mechanisms; facsimile or email attachment.

The invoice information in the documents all had to be manually processed and delivered into a customised workflow approval system called IXOS. Within IXOS the authorisation and archiving of invoices takes place before accounts payable information is migrated to Visy’s back office system SAP.

A staff of 32 people was responsible for this labour-intensive, manual document processing that also meant a lot of paper shuffling within the organisation, missing documents and errors in data keying which was coupled with slower processing for supplier Invoices which also increased supplier queries and responses.  

In order to reduce cost, eliminate the risks of errors and to create a more efficient and faster document handling process Richard decided to search for a solution that could automate Visy’s accounts payable document handling and significantly reduce the manual indexing component.

B2BE was selected to provide accounts payable automation, using an outsourcing model that meant no upfront investment costs.

All scanned accounts payable documents received by email, facsimile and hard copy are transmitted to the B2BE server. 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.

Validation is performed 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.