Having made the decision to completely revamp its complex SAP landscape, innogy SE, part of the E.ON Group, needed to replace non-standard workflows and processes with a new standard solution for accounts payable processing. Moving from SAP R/3 to S/4HANA was a large and ambitious project, but a key objective to future proof its IT landscape.
Processing around a third of a million supplier invoices a year, automation was a central element of the transformation project. The firm wanted a solution that could be deployed with little or no customization and be tightly integrated and aligned with SAP.
“Working closely with SAP, we selected the solution best suited to our needs, OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions. The solution follows industry best practices, is capable of covering all of our needs, across multiple geographies and works hand-in-hand with S/4HANA. A big advantage for us is that the OpenText solution is SAP certified, provides many opportunities for automation and also offers SAP Fiori mobile applications. We could clearly see that OpenText would provide what we need for at least five to ten years,” said Marcus Johannes, Process Manager Accounts Payable, innogy SE.
The new solution enables suppliers to submit invoices electronically whether that be as a simple email attachment or via an electronic trading platform. Optical character recognition (OCR) is utilized to automatically process inbound invoices. Working with OpenText Professional Services to design and implement the solution, innogy was able to use an existing OCR solution to help minimize project costs.
With only electronic invoice approvals now allowed, fraud has been significantly reduced with duplicates, errors and omissions being picked up by OpenText. With automation, streamlining, handling of both purchase order and non-purchase order related invoices, the solution seamlessly takes care of routing for approvals, freeing up the centralized shared service center staff to concentrate on other tasks. Bottlenecks are easily picked up too, allowing continuous improvement of processes for the future.
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