Cases

Context
The Cookware Company is an international group operating through several legal entities across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The group set out to modernise the AP process, with a clear ambition to install a clear group-wide process with fewer manual touchpoints and an efficient chain from invoice receipt through to approval and posting.

Challenge
Invoices enter the organisation through a variety of channels, which sometimes caused manual effort. Data capture produced suggestions that still had to be reviewed or completed, and no intelligence was gained from the corrections. Coding was constrained. The approval flow made routing and delegation hard to manage and harder to trace.

What We Did
We stepped in as external advisor, from the process diagnosis, through platform selection and the adoption in the finance teams.
Deliberately independent of any vendor we define the target process first and then found the tool that fits it.
• Process mapping the actual AS IS ran rather than how it was assumed to run. 
• Pinpointing pain points and bottlenecks 
• Designing process and tool improvements (TO BE) translated into a structured requirements set • Running the vendor selection against those requirements, with customised demonstrations.
• Implementation guidance and quality safeguard.
• Supporting adoption with the finance teams through go-live so ownership stayed inside the organisation.
• Embedding the new way of working in documented procedures with a clear roadmap for the next phase.

Outcome
• One platform for reception, capture, coding and approval now happening in a single environment directly connected to the ERP
• Fewer manual touchpoints directed to handling exceptions
• Self-learning solution with corrections training the model, so invoices increasingly flow through untouched
• Better quality at source — dimensions, tags and the cost/capex split are captured direclty on the invoice
• Traceable approvals with automatic routing, built in delegation and mobile access 
• Real-time visibility with alerts on missing fields, mismatches and outliers instead of surprises at month-end.

The transformation was less about a pure technology swap but triggered from a process-improvement ambition. By first defining the target process and selecting a platform against it, the group replaced a fragmented chain with a single automated flow integrating directly with its ERP backbone. For a business handling tens of thousands of invoices a year across thirteen countries, that shift compounds with every invoice processed.