Packaging leader achieves seamless cloud AP automation in S/4HANA

Packaging leader

Employees: 9000+

Products & Services: Packaging

Headquarters: Switzerland

Our customer is a leading provider of safe, sustainable, and affordable food and beverage solutions for products consumed around the world. The company is headquartered in Switzerland with approximately 9000 employees worldwide and serves customers in over 100 countries. 
 

Business Need

The challenge – mounting operational and regulatory complexity  

The company – already a customer for our SAP-embedded FS² AutoBank solution – acquired a new plant in Mexico with fast-growing invoice volumes. This new acquisition put considerable strain on existing manual AP workflows, which was further exacerbated by the difficulty teams faced uploading documents to the Mexican government’s e-invoice platform. 

To overcome this challenge, the company knew it would need an AP automation solution that would both lighten the load associated with invoice processing while guaranteeing security and efficiency across AP and payments. The organization also knew it would need to pick a partner that would help it automate its country-specific e-invoicing requirements, while standardizing processing across global sites. 

Solution

The transformation approach – full integration with SAP S/4HANA and e-invoice portal 

The company’s chosen solution would need to work across on-prem and public cloud environments for 4 separate company codes in the US, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. It would also need to meet global regulatory requirements to allow for future expansion across other EU countries where e-invoicing mandates are increasingly the norm. 

The company chose Serrala Alevate AP as the perfect solution for their complex AP automation needs. The organization began a rapid implementation process, which integrated their solution with their Sovos e-invoicing platform and their chosen ERP systems: SAP ECC and S/4HANA public cloud using pre-built APIs.

The results 

Fully unified digital AP solution and global compliance 

The customer benefited immediately from a single, global AP automation solution that supports everything from invoice capture through processing and visibility into payments across multiple ERP systems and geographies (US, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand). The AP team can quickly and seamlessly handle e-invoice processing in line with Mexican regulatory requirements. And has a single view and workflow of all incoming invoices regardless of format (whether XML, PDF, JPG, or .doc). 

Our solution instantly matches invoices to purchase orders to achieve a 3-way or x-way match, auto-posting as many invoices as possible to reduce manual work and automatically routing invoices for approval and exception handed as needed to significantly accelerate workflows. All posted invoices can also be viewed at any time in the company’s ERP platforms. 

Payment controls and fraud prevention are embedded in the solution, and every incoming invoice is automatically validated against the company’s master data and accounting controls, and for compliance with e-invoicing mandates.

Any of these challenges sound familiar? 

Think you might benefit from what Serrala can offer in accounts payable? Speak to one of our experts today.