Manufacturer increases PO usage with P2P analytics application

The Challenge

To say this customer had AP and finance challenges is an understatement. Here are the key problems the global £1bn+ manufacturing business divulged to us:

Their AP team were processing around 5,000 supplier invoices each month, and getting bogged-down with far too much manual intervention
A no-PO no-pay policy was being implemented and at the same time the process for receipting goods was ineffective
Invoices were not being matched and required manual intervention, wasting resource

The knock-on effect of these challenges were twofold:

An inordinate amount queries to manage from suppliers, which drained huge amounts of team resource
Payment times were taking a hit in the payment practices reports

The Solution

Working with our customer’s AP and IT teams, Barcanet’s data team designed a suite of interactive reports and dashboards that enabled the team to identify trends, bottlenecks and process flaws. It also helped them identify and ‘zoom in’ to persistent offenders, both within the business and with suppliers. Using the data-driven insights surfaced in these reports, management were able to define new payment strategies. They were also able to monitor and track improvements against their KPIs easily and quickly.

The Results

We helped our customer in a number of different ways:

With no change to average payment terms, late payments were reduced by 20%.
Over 80% (and still increasing) of invoices are now covered by a PO
The number of different payment terms has been rationalised and optimised
The customer now has simplified processes and generated thousands of £’s in savings from the cost of capital