WORLD’S LEADING PURCHASING GROUP, PROGROS, 100% DIGITALISES ITS AP OPERATIONS WITH IVI!
OUR CLIENT
Progros is the largest Purchasing Consultancy in the Hotel and Tourism Industry-Sector and one of the leading purchasing companies in the entire world. With 4 Strategic Business Units (SBU’s) covering Group Purchasing, Consulting, Project Management, and Web Applications; Progros offers comprehensive solutions for optimizing the procurement of goods and services on behalf of international hotel chains around the world.
Progros Group Purchasing manages the selection and procurement of over 350,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKU’s) represented by over 1,000 Suppliers which achieves purchasing expenditure savings of approximately 18 Million Euros per annum for over 500 international hotel chain customers. Furthermore, Progros Consulting and Project Management has been responsible for the entire procurement lifecycle for Furniture, Fixture and Equipment (FF & E) and Operating Supplies and Equipment (OS & E) for over 200 new international hotel developments; while it’s Web Applications process 600,000 online transactions per annum.
CHALLENGE
In order to cost-effectively centrally negotiate and regulate the purchasing expenditure of over 350,000 SKU’s from over 1,000 Suppliers on behalf of over 500 international hotel chain customers; Progros required a best-in-class Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) Solution incorporating industry-leading Accounts Payable (AP) Automation and e-Invoicing Technologies.
To manage the existing AP processes, Progros required a large amount of expensive Finance Department Resources to manage the myriad of Supplier document types that they would receive, including order confirmations, advanced shipping notifications (ASN’s), invoices, credit notes, and reminders. To add to the complexity of their AP processes, these Supplier documents were received in a variety of different document and data formats, containers, and transmission channels; resulting in a possible over 20,000 combinations of how documents and data would be received.
This meant that transaction document processing times were too long, productivity was too low, mistakes were common, and human resources were overwhelmed, as the entire Supply Chain Management lacked an integrated and streamlined solution to manage this multi-channel document and data exchange matrix.
Progros not only needed to significantly reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of its existing AP Operations in order to optimize its profitability; but also to provide its customers with automated, reliable, cost-effective, and transparent procurement solutions at hyper-speed, to ensure the growth and future-proofing of their business.
OUR SOLUTION
ivi with the world’s most technologically-advanced Suite of P2P, AP, and e-Invoicing Solutions, provided Progros with an AP Automation and e-Invoicing Solution that automatically digitalised and processed any inbound Supplier transaction document from over a possible 20,000 combinations of document and data formats.
No matter the demographic of the Supplier, whether they were a Small to Medium Size Enterprise (SME) with no automatic processing capabilities relying on paper documents, to a large Multi-National Company (MNC) with extensive ERP and IT system landscapes; the ivi AP Automation and e-Invoicing Solution supported the whole bandwidth of possible requirements, integrating the Progros supply chain across all different types of companies.
While SME’s required no more than a simple Internet connection and 10 minutes to install the ivi Connector (for a rapid entry to the ivi Network); the ivi AP Automation and e-Invoicing Solution already integrated with over 350 ERP and Finance & Accounting Systems utilised by the MNC’s, resulting in no changes to the existing systems, structures and processes of the Supplier ecosystem.
The ivi AP Automation and e-Invoicing Solution then took care of the industry-leading 100% accurate extraction, conversion, and delivery of the specifically requested document and data formats by Progros, automatically propagated into their ERP System and AP Work-Flow, combining the presentation formats (PDF, TIFF) for human communications with the data exchange requirements of different IT systems (CSV, XML, i-DOC, Edifact).
RESULT
This new ivi AP Automation and e-Invoicing Solution immediately achieved the following benefits for Progros:
* 100% eradication of manually-intensive activities such as the keying-in of Supplier Invoice data including hundreds of line items.
* 100% elimination of labour-intensive processes for Supplier Paper Invoice management including receipt, collating, approval routing, and payment.
* Dramatic reduction in the average Supplier Invoice processing time from 14 days to 1 day.
* Supplier Invoice data extracted, converted, and imported into their ERP System with 100% accuracy.
* Supplier Invoice data 100% digitalised and automated facilitating central settlement, tax compliance, tamper-proofing, and e-archiving.
* Significant reduction in Supplier Invoice processing and human resource costs, resulting in optimized profitability and renewed focus on revenue building activities.
“With the expertise of ivi, Progros integrated AP Automation and e-Invoicing Technologies into our business. Today, over 60% of our Suppliers utilize ivi’s e-Invoicing Solution, while ivi still digitalises, automates, and delivers electronic data to us, from our Supplier Paper Invoices. This has dramatically increased our efficiency, reduced our processing costs, increased financial data transparency, and provided us with a streamlined and digital invoice management workflow.”
Jochen Oehler, Head of Group Purchasing