Success story
Adelaide Brighton LtdIndustry• ManufacturingSolutions• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management
for SAP® Solutions• OpenText™ Document Accessfor SAP® Solutions

Results
Increased productivity andefficiency through digitized process
Total visibility of invoice status at
all times
Secure, auditable, and recoverable
invoice document storage
Fewer FTE requirements due
to automated and streamlined
invoice processing
Growing invoice volumes managedwithout additional resources

Australian manufacturer automatesand accelerates invoice processing
Adelaide Brighton creates a more efficient and scalable AP operationwith OpenText Suite for SAP®
“We’ve seen significant reductions in cost and resource
requirements, and improvements in efficiency, scalability,and visibility.”
Mark Tosolini

Group IT Manager
Adelaide Brighton Ltd

Australian manufacturer automates and accelerates invoice processing

Adelaide Brighton Ltd is a leading Australian manufacturer andsupplier of products for the building, construction, infrastructure,and mineral processing markets throughout Australia. The
company’s principal activities include producing and distributing
cement, industrial lime, concrete, aggregates, and concreteproducts. With over 1,500 employees, Adelaide Brighton operates
major production facilities, and boasts extensive distribution
networks throughout Australia.

BackgroundTo remain a market leader, Adelaide Brighton is committed toachieving operational excellence. Its need to optimize operations andreduce costs has driven the IT group at Adelaide Brighton toward
digitizing their business processes. Recently, the group reviewed its
purchase-to-pay processes, including accounts payable, to identify
opportunities to reduce costs and improve operational performance.
Using OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP® Solutions andOpenText™ Document Access for SAP® Solutions, Adelaide Brighton
automated its invoice management processes—increasing efficiency
and decreasing cost.

Challenge

Paper-based, manual invoice processing

Adelaide Brighton’s Cement and Lime Division accounts payable (AP)department is based in Adelaide and staffed by experienced, long-time
employees who were using manual, paper-based processes to manage
the company’s invoices. It was estimated that each member of the fiveperson processing team was handling roughly 10,000 invoices per year.

Mark Tosolini, Group IT Manager at Adelaide Brighton, explains, “We hada very paper-based process. All 50,000 invoices had to be converted
to hard copy if they weren’t already. Though we were encouraging
vendors to move to email, we still had to turn the invoices back into
hard copy and scan them all. The scanned image was pushed to SAP,
but from that point on, it was handled manually. We were using email
and spreadsheets. The status of invoices, what problems we had withthem, had we paid them, what was overdue—all those sorts of things
were managed in a very manual fashion.”
Adelaide Brighton relied heavily on the expertise of the AP staff tomanage the manual processes, but this was not sustainable as volumes
grew. The team embarked on a purchase-to-pay automation project tofind and implement a solution that would fundamentally improve thecompany’s invoice management processes and expand seamlessly into
the other business divisions.

Solution

Automated invoice processing and robust SAP integration

Over several months, Adelaide Brighton assessed four vendors, including
OpenText. Adelaide Brighton had rolled out a SAP platform in 2009, andTosolini explains that “the integration into SAP and compatibility had
to be an important element in the roadmap of whichever solution
we chose.”
The strategic alliance OpenText shares with SAP played a large part in thecompany’s final choice. “Our decision was more about future directions. We thought that it was the best long-term decision for Adelaide
Brighton to choose OpenText Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for
SAP Solutions,” states Tosolini. The VIM solution optimizes and automates
the process of receiving, managing, routing, and monitoring invoices andrelated documentation, and features deep integration with SAP.

“Our decision was more
about future directions.
We thought that it was
the best long-term
decision for Adelaide
Brighton to choose
OpenText Vendor Invoice
Management (VIM) for
SAP Solutions.”
Mark Tosolini

Group IT Manager
Adelaide Brighton LtdAustralian manufacturer automates and accelerates invoice processing

Another critical requirement for Adelaide Brighton was archiving technology for the AP process. The team selected Document Access for
SAP Solutions, which permits storage, management, and retrieval ofSAP documents across SAP modules. The company used an establishedsolution for OCR data extraction, which integrates seamlessly with theOpenText solution.

Implementation

Rapid deployment

With the help of partner Stonebridge Systems, Adelaide Brighton had thenew solution up and running within a few months. “The implementation
process was very clean,” reports Tosolini. “It was a significant turnaround and it was done very simply by going back to the basics of how
the process was meant to work.”
Coincidentally, prior to going live with the solution, two of the mostexperienced members of the AP team, who were also the businesssubject matter experts on the project team, moved on to other roles in
the company. Tosolini credits the OpenText solution and the improvement
focus from the incoming AP Manager for helping the business overcomethat hurdle: “It’s a testament to the nature of the OpenText solution.
We got through that challenge extremely quickly and quite successfully by working very collaboratively with the AP team and utilizing
the solution effectively for what it was.”Benefits

Digital invoice processing
With the VIM solution in place, Adelaide Brighton has seen a number ofkey improvements. “We’ve seen significant reductions in cost andresource requirements, and improvements in efficiency, scalability,and visibility. The end result is an excellent outcome. The integration
with our OCR solution also works seamlessly and is one of the mostrobust components of the solution. Dropping the document image
into the Document Access for SAP Solutions archiving component
also works seamlessly,” states Tosolini.
Efficiency, simplicity and optimized processes
By automating invoice routing, approval, and payment processes, thecompany was able to streamline workflows and improve payment cycles.
As a result, the AP group has eliminated bottlenecks and reduced issues
such as overdue invoices, which sometimes numbered in the hundreds.
“Today we typically have less than 30 overdue invoices at any time
and this figure can drop much lower at times. These days, there istypically an issue with the invoice itself if it is overdue, whereas in thepast it was often because of time-consuming manual processing,”
explains Tosolini.
Reduced staffing requirements
With invoice processing now automated and streamlined, the company
has seen a drop in its FTE requirements. In addition, AP staff can be
more productive by focusing on more value added activities. With themajority of the invoice processing using a three-way match approachof vendor invoice, purchase order, and order receipt, the invoice iseither resolved and closed or it is routed to a business user because
an exception has been identified. “We’ve gone through that principlewith the AP staff, and that made it a lot more effective for them andgot invoices processed much quicker,” says Tosolini. In recent times,growing confidence in both the solution and the business users has
meant VIM invoice exceptions flow directly to business users undercertain scenarios.

“It’s a testament to thenature of the OpenTextsolution. We got throughthat challenge extremely
quickly and quite
successfully by working
very collaboratively withthe AP team and utilizing
the solution effectively
for what it was.”Mark Tosolini

Group IT Manager
Adelaide Brighton Ltd

Australian manufacturer automates and accelerates invoice processing

Scalable foundation
The VIM solution provides a foundation for scalable growth. Adelaide
Brighton is experiencing increased invoice volumes due to acquisitionsin its Concrete and Aggregates division, but it continues to provide highlevels of service without additional resources. “It’s gone very well forus. The solution at the moment has to run with two separate AP teams,
the original one in Adelaide and now one based in Sydney where theConcrete and Aggregates crew are. We’ve been able to tweak the VIM
solution quite easily to accommodate the two separate locations,”
notes Tosolini.
Strategic analytics reporting
Adelaide Brighton has been able to extract business value using someof the solution’s built-in reports. Tosolini explains, “The VIM Analytics
report does give some very good visibility over some of our key
metrics, including overdue invoice counts and invoices in processwith both AP and the business users. Historically, we used this reporting to broadcast system status to a wider group of stakeholders.
In recent times, it has been distributed on an as-needed basis.”
Enhanced visibility
Complete, real-time visibility into the status of invoices is anotherbenefit to the company. “AP’s ability to see where all invoices are ateach stage of the process is a major plus. If a vendor asks where
something is, it is very straightforward to answer their question,”says Tosolini.

Audit trails have also enhanced user accountability. Tosolini indicates thatusers were put on notice: “The message to our business users was thatyou can’t hide from VIM because we can very easily see exactly wholast touched the invoice, and what they did or didn’t do.” Responding
to auditor requests is also a painless process. “Auditors can just use
a vendor analytics report in many cases. It is very simple for themto retrieve information. There are few dramas when it comes to providing invoice processing history and documentation,” states Tosolini.
Lower costs via integrated archiving
The digitization of Adelaide Brighton’s paper-based processes also
eliminated the need and cost to store massive volumes of hard copies
of every invoice and many supporting documents. “There wereroughly 250,000 sheets of paper stored in cardboard boxes and thenmoved to our storage facilities. Utilizing Document Access for SAP
Solutions enables document images to be stored in the system andeasily accessible to users. We don’t have to keep hardcopies any
longer or store them in costly storage centers,” explains Tosolini.

FutureBuilding on its success and its commitment to operational excellence,
Adelaide Brighton intends to expand use of the solution. In the near
future, the team plans to bring its Concrete Products division onto
the VIM solution, and in the longer term, they are reviewing options toextend use of the archiving solution to other documents as well.

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company™,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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