Case Study: HDT Streamlines SAP Procure to Pay Process

Continuous Improvement Dashboards Enterprise Forms and Workflows Precisely / Winshuttle Procure to Pay

Posted on 03/01/23 by Jodi Reimer

Procurement and payment processing as a military supplier is important to manage appropriately and within the context of company and government business rules. Auditability and visibility are also critical. Having to adhere to rigorous governmental rules coupled with a fast-paced, private equity ownership environment, the procure to pay process was a prime candidate for automation at HDT.

With SAP as the primary system of record, any automation efforts required easy SAP integrations while layering on the benefits of workflow control. HDT wanted to not only automate and streamline their procure to pay processes but centralize their AP department to one location.

Key Challenges

Complexities such as PO line-item matching, touching invoices that are normal recurring items, and determining approvers by type of invoice all consumed valuable time spent by accounting personnel. These complexities resulted in:

Duplicate payments

Late fees

Human error

Employees couldn’t keep up with the volume

Results

CPS and HDT worked together to develop a robust front to back automation solution. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and enterprise workflow was introduced to the organization. The OCR technology reads the data from the invoice and outputs it to an Excel file. Then a workflow is triggered to confirm approval or automatic payment. HDT now has a workflow solution that decreases manual tasks and only presents invoices that require review / approval to the appropriate employee. Process BI is in place to provide near real-time metrics of all processes and tasks and to track KPIs for accounts payable.