At SCHOTT, we have a heritage of more than 140 years in reinventing glass to make life better. Today, our 17,100 global employees leverage tech-material expertise and unique know-how in processing and technology to create products that support a wide range of industries: from CERAN home appliances to architecture, healthcare, automotive, and high-tech manufacturing.
To support our operations, we’ve built up an extensive supplier base. Keeping our business running smoothly depends on our ability to process thousands of supplier invoices every month, accurately and on-time. Because of our fast rate of growth, the number of invoices we receive is also rising. In fact, we’ve seen our supplier invoice volumes more than treble in recent years.
If it hadn’t been for our work with OpenText, this increase in workload would have been a big issue for us. Fortunately, we were more than ready for the challenge. That’s because several years earlier we started out on our journey to bring digitization and automation to accounts payable (AP) processes at SCHOTT.
Starting the AP automation journey
Our journey began at our shared services center, which is responsible for processing supplier invoices on behalf of all our global business units. In the past, our AP teams relied primarily on manual, paper-based processes, which included manually re-keying invoice data into our SAP systems. It was very time-consuming, and there was little time available for our teams to spend on other work.
As the number of inbound invoices started to trend sharply upwards, we knew we’d either need to either significantly increase our AP headcount or find a much more efficient approach to invoice processing.
That’s when we made the decision to deploy OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions. The solution ticked off all the requirements that mattered most to us, including tight integration with our SAP business systems. We’d already been using OpenText solutions to archive our SAP data for several years, so we knew that we could count on OpenText for reliable solutions and strong technical support.
Processing invoices 99% faster
At first, we only used Vendor Invoice Management to process invoices from our suppliers in just a few countries; however, after we saw how much time we were saving, we decided to extend the solution to cover our global businesses too—35 countries in total.
Working side-by-side with OpenText Professional Services, we extended and enhanced the solution. As well as building automated invoice processing workloads for our international businesses, we deployed OpenText Capture for SAP Solutions to gain more control, save costs, and boost the recognition rate for data capture.
The project was a big success. Thanks to Vendor Invoice Management and Capture, we can process bigger volumes of invoices at our service center faster than ever. Before OpenText, it used to take around five working days to post an invoice. Today, our AP team can do it an average of five minutes: over 99% faster.
Keeping headcount flat
Fast, streamlined processes have only become more important for us over time. When we first started working with OpenText, we were processing one third of the invoices we now process each year. By empowering our AP professionals with digital workflows, we can handle that massive increase in workload while keeping headcount in our shared service center flat.
The OpenText solutions are also helping us to foster an engaging working environment for our teams. Now that we’ve done away with repetitive manual data-entry, there’s more time for our AP teams to focus on value-added activities. We’ve achieved great results with OpenText, but there are so many opportunities to do more, like automating more invoices.
At SCHOTT, we believe that everyone can make a difference. Through our partnership with OpenText, we’re putting our philosophy into practice. To learn more about how we are working with OpenText to enhance our accounts payable operations, read our case study.
Read the case study
