Implementing Vendor Invoice Management
To level up processing the vendor invoices you receive, invoice automation is, hands down, the way to go. Vendor Invoice Management "VIM" is an OpenText product embedded in the SAP ERP system. It optimizes and simplifies the process of receiving, validating, managing, routing and monitoring of vendor invoices and facilitates collaboration with stakeholders within the Procure to Pay process.
What are the common problems with an Invoice Management Process
Multiple people/teams involved in the processing of a vendor invoices, which means having to distribute the invoices and associated information multiple times.
Multiple stakeholders means several copies of an invoice can exist causing a lack of transparency and different versions of the truth.
The invoice processing cycle time can be very long and involve multiple manual steps, leading to loss of early payment discounts.
Difficult to reduce or prevent duplicate payments, postings and even lost invoices
How does Vendor Invoice Management solve these problems
Automate paper to post invoices. This eliminates paper early in the process, and is made possible by the OCR tool called Intelligent Capture.
Invoice data sent via email or in the post can be automatically extracted, and validation checks applied, where workflow and approvals are triggered to enable posting of the invoice.
Here are some lessons learned from RDS during implementations of VIM
To maximize the zero touch approach as much as possible, a customer organization structure for scanning & OCR validation should be in place. As an example, who is responsible for scanning the paper invoice sent in the mail, who should validate the scanned invoices and the OCR extraction results?
VIM is based on SAP standard workflows, so Basis support maybe required to smooth out any potential bottlenecks and ensure efficient system performance.
Some customers may feel a separate archive system is not required and choose to store all invoice documents on the SAP database. There should be a thorough review of current and anticipated invoice volume including any additional supplement documents that suppliers may send along with their invoices. Storing all invoice document on the SAP database could have major performance impact on other processes in SAP.
There should be a strong emphasis on having the minimal amount of customizations in the VIM design as possible. Because the more customizations may directly lead to an increase in technical system support costs as well as increased costs and time for system upgrades.
Common Pitfalls to avoid
There needs to be a good sample of paper invoices used to train OCR to help improve the extractions results before Go-Live.
To truly gain the benefits of VIM, organization's should have a centralized invoice process. This means all invoices should always go to a central team instead of different individuals from various departments. Therefore, an assessment of the impact of moving to a centralized process should be performed to gain buy in from the important stakeholders.
Communicating with suppliers about your new VIM system and using the opportunity to inform them of what information you expect on the invoice and how they should be submitted.
Does the customer have an Internal invoices/payment request process? VIM can be used for such internal processes although its not a standard approach.
To enable the emailed invoice functionality. Email server configuration outside of SAP is required. Therefore this should be addressed as early as possible to ensure sufficient resource is available.
Increased accountability on the procurement team (i.e booking GR’s and help resolve issues).
A vendor management platform that brings all your workflows, files, receipts, and invoices together in one accessible place. Assistance from RDS Consulting is available for best practices blueprinting, enablement and connectivity activities, providing an extra layer of assurance that the implementation will follow best practices design guidelines.
