SUCCESS STORY
Bloomin’ Brands Inc.
Industry• Food servicesSolution• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Managementfor SAP Solutions®

Restaurant enterprise transforms
corporate invoicing
Bloomin’ Brands accelerates cycle time with OpenText™ Vendor®
Invoice Management for SAP Solutions

Results
Eliminated offshore accounts
payable resource, reduced
in-house staffing by half
Enhanced financial visibility
and accuracy
Accelerated cycle time forcorporate payments“With Vendor Invoice
Management, wesee where any invoice
is at any given time.”
Becky Quaranda

Senior AccountantBloomin’ Brands

Restaurant enterprise transforms corporate invoicing

Having sold well over a billion dollars of “Bloomin’ Onions” andother signature dishes, one of the largest casual dining restaurant
companies in the world fine-tuned corporate invoicing with
OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP® Solutions. Years
later, Bloomin’ Brands Inc. remains efficient and resilient, evenduring unexpected challenges.
With its flagship Outback Steakhouse restaurant in Florida paving
the way to more than 1,000 restaurants in 47 states and 20 countries,
Bloomin’ Brands bills itself as a company of restaurants rather than arestaurant company. Though its team has grown to more than 77,000
people, Bloomin’ Brands core values centered on a passion for foodand shared hospitality remain as intimate as a dinner with friends.
In the Tampa corporate office, Becky Quaranda, senior accountant
in the Accounts Payable department, serves the full portfolio ofBloomin’ Brands concept restaurants, featuring Outback Steakhouse,
Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouseand Wine Bar. Among other responsibilities, Quaranda oversees thevendor set-up team, all invoice and payment processing and—withclose to two decades on the payroll herself—she recalls changes tooperations, all driven by commitment to the company core values.
For instance, in 2014, Bloomin’ Brands initiated a transition to a newenterprise resource planning system and, within that, more effective
resources for the accounts payable team. “We were looking to moveaway from decentralized invoicing that we had with all of ourcorporate invoices,” Quaranda said. “At one time, paper invoices
were walked from person to person for approval, often stacking

up and resulting in delays and a lack of transparency. We didn’t
have a lot of visibility into that spend because these invoices
could be sitting on anybody’s desk in the company,” she noted.
Inevitably, when invoices became buried under other paperwork,
last-minute demands pilfered productivity from other areas. “We
would have to stop everything to get these invoices enteredand get the payment out the door,” according to Quaranda. “Theprocess was not efficient.”
Along with migration to SAP®, Bloomin’ Brands’ consultants
recommended OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP
Solutions. Fully embedded into SAP, the invoice processing solution
includes pre-configured rules, roles and actions to fully automate
invoice receipt and posting. It ensures invoices get to the right person
for resolution, approval or payment and provides artificial intelligenceto simplify the tasks or minimize data entry.
Almost all corporate vendors for Bloomin’ Brands now email invoices
to a single address. Though it is possible to automatically transfer
invoices, Bloomin’ Brands employees easily drag and drop the files
to Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions. Optical character
recognition (OCR) scans and digitizes the incoming files, thensecurely integrates and stores the data with SAP transactions
and processes.
Following implementation of Vendor Invoice Management for SAPSolutions, Bloomin’ Brands now processes 3,000 invoices per monththrough a centralized, automated system. Even better, the enterprise
does so with fewer staff members than previously required for thebusiness-critical operation.

“Our accruals are much
more accurate now. Evenif invoices are out for
approval, we can accountfor it.”
Becky Quaranda

Senior Accountant
Bloomin’ Brands

Restaurant enterprise transforms corporate invoicing

During paper-based management, Bloomin’ Brands employed 18
in-house employees within the Accounts Payable department aswell as an offshore team of up to 25 more people through a businessprocess vendor. With automated processing and other improvements,
the restaurant enterprise now maintains a leaner team of eight to 10
in-house professionals and no offshore counterparts. “Along withOpenText, we re-evaluated other processes when we broughtthem back in house to make them more efficient,” Quaranda said.
Bloomin’ Brands attained other areas of efficiency through its
digital transformation of invoices with Vendor Invoice Management for
SAP Solutions:

Increased visibility of documentation, payment status
Rather than floating in through team members across the company,
invoices arrive directly from vendors to the central OpenText system.
“With Vendor Invoice Management, we see where any invoice is, atany given time,” Quaranda related. Enhanced visibility eases auditing
responsibilities as well: “We have everything in OpenText—all theimages are right there at our fingertips.” The convenience stands
in contrast to difficulties gathering copies of invoices when the paper
files were scattered across multiple locations.

Reduced cycle time and last-minute scrambles
Quaranda also reported the cycle time for processing invoices
is faster compared to former methods. When invoices arrive forteam members to code, the image is already in the system withheader fields and necessary data. The invoices are easier to handle
immediately rather than put aside. “We may still receive some lastminute things,” Quaranda noted, “but definitely not as many as we
did back in the day.”Having experienced enhanced automation and collaboration for
financial processes for several years, Quaranda expressed sympathy
for organizations still mailing copies of invoices. “It just takes so longto get the things you need,” she said. “I don’t know how they do it.”

Increased accuracy of accruals
Handy information within Vendor Invoice Management for SAPSolutions also helps Bloomin’ Brands improve its expense accruals
during its month-end processes, according to Quaranda. “Ouraccruals are more accurate now,” she said. “Even if invoices arestill out for approval, we can account for them. Whereas before, if
it was just paper sitting on somebody’s desk, we might not know
the invoice existed.”Restaurant enterprise transforms corporate invoicing

Saved office space and supplies

Maintained resilience amid challenges

Physically maintaining close to 50,000 invoices per year required a
substantial amount of folders, filing cabinets and office space. Now
that all corporate invoices are processed digitally, there is no need tostore paper documents. Quaranda: “The invoices are all housed andeasily accessible within OpenText.”

Efficiencies proved especially helpful during the worldwide COVID-19
pandemic. As many restaurants faced lockdowns, they needed agility
to keep the doors open even as people worked from home. “Forinvoicing, it was very easy for us to just continue on like normal,”
Quaranda said, expressing gratitude that the system was alreadyin place for employees to complete approvals via remote log-in.
“We still received the same volume of invoices and processed
everything within the same timelines.”

Reduced duplicate payments
Though rare, duplicate payments occasionally occurred when Bloomin’
Brands team members processed invoices manually. All invoices
now arrive via one point of contact and invoice numbering is moreconsistent, Quaranda said, noting Vendor Invoice Management for
SAP Solutions also checks against pre-configured rules set by
the Bloomin’ Brands team: “We can now catch most of duplicatesup front.”

During a pandemic or not, digital transformation continues to bea priority for Bloomin’ Brands. Going forward, the company plans
to expand invoice automation to its restaurant locations to realize
productivity and profitability improvements already in place at thecorporate office.

About OpenText
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through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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