Success story
Bumble Bee Foods
Industry• FoodSolutions• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Managementfor SAP® Solutions• OpenText™ Invoice Capture Centerfor SAP® Solutions• OpenText™ Document Acces for SAP®
Solutions

Partner support

End-to-end process automation
with OpenText and SAP®

OpenText Solutions for SAP allows Bumble Bee Foods to transform
accounting operations• Optima ConsultingResults
Reduced invoice processing
costs by 50%
Reduced AP processing staff
from 13 to 5
Increased discount capture rateby 80%
Reduced number of global
processing plants from 6 to 2

“Our invoice processing operations went from 100%
paper-based to 100% non-paper-based, and we were able
to reduce our total staff from thirteen FTEs to only five.”
Farrah Goldberg

General Accounting Manager
Bumble Bee Foods

End-to-end process automation with OpenText and SAP®

Bumble Bee Foods was founded by a handful of dedicated fishermenin 1899. Today, privately held and headquarteredin the United States,
Bumble Bee Foods, LLC is North America’s largest branded shelfstable seafood company, offering a full line of canned and pouchedtuna, salmon, sardines and specialty seafood products marketedin the US under leading brands, including Bumble Bee®, Brunswick®,Snow’s® and Beach Cliff®, and in Canada under the Clover Leaf® brand.

Driving internal efficiencies and cost savings

Today, the Bumble Bee brand stands for quality, nutritional value andaffordability. With tuna costs rising to historic-level prices, a majorindustry trend and key challenge for Bumble Bee is to maintain a goodprice point for their customers without sacrificing quality. It is a goal that
requires an ongoing commitment to internal efficiencies and businesscost reduction.
One area where the organization was challenged was in their procure-to-pay process. By 2011, each invoice was taking approximately 20
days to process and had an average cost of $5.80, roughly 65 percent
higher than the industry average. The AP department was decentralized and different plants in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico
all managed separate processes. Invoice processing was 100 percent
paper-based, resulting in a lack of process visibility and inefficiencies. Invoices often went missing and AP clerks spent an estimated 80
percent of their time searching for invoices and responding to inquiries.
Auditor requests took weeks to fulfill.
To address these challenges, Bumble Bee began the search for asolution that would allow them to eliminate manual processes and standardize on and consolidate operations. Heading up the search was
Farrah Goldberg, general accounting manager at the San Diego headoffice. “We were really lacking on the procure-to-pay side as far astechnology. It was a very archaic process. We needed a third-party
tool that would allow us to optimize processes and ultimately reduce
costs per invoice,” says Goldberg.

Integrated solutions key to turnaroundAs an SAP® user, Bumble Bee wanted to leverage their existing investment and find a complementary set of solutions that integrated tightly
with their SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform. After alengthy review process, they selected OpenTextTM Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for SAP® Solutions (also sold by SAP as SAP Invoice
Management by OpenText). The VIM solution integrates seamlessly
with SAP and offers workflow functionality that enables users to easily
manage and route invoices for approval. “We liked the fact that VIM
synched so well with SAP. The screens looked very similar to what
our AP group is used to seeing with SAP and so we knew it would bea smooth transition for the team,” says Goldberg.
In addition to Vendor Invoice Management, Bumble Bee wanted toleverage optical character recognition (OCR) technology to increase
invoice volume throughput. OpenTextTM Invoice Capture Center (ICC) forSAP® Solutions allows the organization to further extend the capabilities of VIM and completely automate the capture of paper invoices. The
Invoice Capture Center solution, also sold by SAP, extracts invoice dataand virtually eliminates human intervention in the invoice capture stageof AP processing. “The ICC product was a key factor in our decision
to go with OpenText solutions. We really liked the OCR capabilities
and the additional validation functionality that allows our users toeasily capture and classify invoices. Some of the other software we“We’ve decreased invoiceprocessing costs by over50%, driven mainly byheadcount reduction, butalso due to instituting amore automated processthat reduces errors.”
Farrah Goldberg

General Accounting Manager
Bumble Bee Foods

End-to-end process automation with OpenText and SAP®

looked at required users to have to hand-key items that didn’t get
picked up by the OCR functionality. We wanted to eliminate humanerror and the ICC and VIM combination helps to automate almost
every step of the process,” says Goldberg.

from thirteen full-time equivalents (FTEs) to only five,” says Goldberg.
“We decreased invoice processing costs by over 50 percent, driven
mainly by headcount redeployment, but also due to instituting amore automated process that reduces errors.”

To store invoices that have been scanned into the system, Bumble Beeuses OpenTextTM Document Access for SAP® Solutions. The solution
allows the company to eliminate their paper filing system and archive all
invoices digitally going forward.

With VIM and ICC, invoices are quickly converted to electronic form in
an end-to-end workflow automation process. “We currently have agreat hit rate on what is captured by OCR. This solution, in particular,
was a big factor in our ability to streamline our workforce and go
down to only five FTEs,” says Goldberg.

Implementing change

To implement their suite of OpenText products, Bumble Bee selected
Optima Consulting, an OpenText implementation partner. Bumble Beewent through a long planning process up front before meeting withOptima in order to ensure they had an executive sponsor and full buy-infrom each affected department. With their framework for change inplace, their next step was to produce a case study to ensure they could
customize the VIM solution to fit into their AP process. “The onsite casestudy lasted about a week, and once we were confident in the design,
the rest of the implementation went forward fairly quickly. The
entire process from major design to actual go-live took around threemonths,” says Goldberg.

Streamlined operations lead to time and cost savings

Within 16 months of their deployment of OpenText solutions, Bumble
Bee achieved some remarkable results. “We were able to consolidate
our global AP processing centers from six to only two. Our invoiceprocessing operations went from 100 percent paper-based to 100
percent non-paper-based and we were able to reduce our total staff

Procurement and AP staff members now have full visibility into where
invoices are at each stage of the process. They can more easily resolve
issues on purchase orders and ensure that items no longer slip throughthe cracks. “Before, there were a lot of surprises, but now we havethe ability to easily go back and see all the history of a given invoice
to get an understanding of where things changed and ensure thateverything is paid according to the contract,” says Goldberg. Having
more transparency and visibility into the workflow payment process
helps AP identify bottlenecks and retrain people where needed.
Built-in reporting functions in the VIM solution provide a smoothermonth-end close process. It used to take the team over a week tocomplete month-end close and the accruals for the AP liabilities. TheVIM solution helps make the process much more seamless by providing
a month-end accrual report. “I’m now able to come in Monday morning
after month end, hit a button to get our report to upload to SAP, andthen immediately close the books,” says Goldberg.

End-to-end process automation with OpenText and SAP®

A smoother workflow payment process also improved supplier relations.
“When vendors used to call the San Diego office to inquire about apayment, a lot of times the best we could do was say ‘we will call theplant and get back to you.’ Now we’re able to see exactly where theinvoice is in the process and we can tell them approximately when itwill get paid,” says Goldberg.
The ability to process and pay invoices faster also allows Bumble Bee
to take advantage of discount terms. The vendor discount capture rate
improved by 80 percent since the install.

About Optima Consulting

Optima ECM Consulting is a global company centered on EnterpriseContent Management strategies and business solutions for compliance,optimization and collaboration. We ensure our clients increase productivity, improve customer service and reduce operational costs while increasing compliance levels by implementing superior solutions using
the SAP Enterprise Content Management Solutions by OpenText.
www.optimaecm.com

Business transformation and continual improvement

OpenText Solutions for SAP helped usher in a business transformationthat saw Bumble Bee break down communication barriers between procurement and AP, move from paper-based to electronic invoice processing, consolidate operations and significantly reduce costs.
A fundamental shift has occurred where AP has moved away from a predominantly transactional role to a more value-based one. “AP used tospend hours upon hours chasing down a single invoice and figuring
out where it was in the process. Now, instead of doing the filing and a
lot of the paper-based activities in a traditional AP department, staff
members are actually resolving issues and looking for new ways tocontinually improve operations,” concludes Goldberg.

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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