Lumeris Empowers Value-Based Healthcare Contracting with Aavenir Contractflow Solution

About Company

Lumeris is a managed services operator for health systems and providers, focused on providing value-based care to achieve extraordinary clinical and financial outcomes. The company’s goal is to align providers and payers across populations with technologies, processes, behaviors, and information to achieve high-quality, cost-effective care with satisfied consumers and engaged physicians. 

Lumeris empowers value-based healthcare through its innovative approach to care delivery, leveraging technology and data-driven insights to improve outcomes and reduce costs. With a focus on aligning providers and payers across populations, Lumeris is at the forefront of the healthcare industry, driving positive change and improving patient outcomes. 

Client’s Contract Management Challenges

With many healthcare contracts to manage, Lumeris needed a reliable solution that could streamline the entire contract management process and reduce the risk of errors.  

Self-Author Contracts by Legal team for Confidential & Client Contracts  

Lumeris encountered a significant challenge as its legal team, entrusted with creating confidential and client contracts, faced limited visibility into the processes. This lack of visibility posed a considerable burden on the legal team, leading to delays due to the substantial workload and restricted insight into the overall operations. 

Difficult metadata extraction 

Among many, one of the primary challenges Lumeris faced was extracting meta-data such as terms and clauses from their contracts as Lumeris is primarily dealing with third party contracts. They needed a solution that could accurately extract this information and provide a clear understanding of the contract’s contents.  

Inaccurate identification and interpretation of clauses 

Furthermore, Lumeris wanted to strengthen clause boundary definition, ensuring that each clause was clearly defined and accurately interpreted. Accurate identification and interpretation of individual clauses within a contract was a difficult task, as clauses are mostly written in various formats and can contain complex language and legal jargon. 

Misunderstandings and misinterpretations 

If clause boundaries are not accurately defined, it can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the contract’s contents, which can result in legal disputes and financial losses. For example, a poorly defined clause boundary could result in an inaccurate understanding of payment terms, leading to delayed payments or financial penalties. 

Vendor Onboarding during Request for Contract against a New Vendor 

Lumeris was encountering challenges in getting vendor details reviewed by their Vendor Management and FP&A Teams when requesting a new contract with a New Vendor. The process has been difficult and time-consuming, leading to delays and inefficiencies in their workflow. 

They needed a solution that can help seamlessly raise contract requests and update vendor details in a centralized place which results in frictionless and soft vendor onboarding. 

The Solution – Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management Solution for Healthcare Industry

Lumeris recently implemented Aavenir’s Contractflow solution to streamline their contract management process. The company’s primary focus was on processing third-party contracts with a strong emphasis on AI-driven capabilities. Aavenir’s Contractflow solution proved to be the ideal fit for Lumeris.  

Self-Author Contract by Legal Team 

Apart from Vendor Contract which requires a request, Aavenir Contractflow provides a flexibility to Legal to create direct confidential and client contracts. Also, visibility to these contracts is limited to certain users. 

AI-driven Capabilities 

The AI-driven solution provided confident extraction of meta-data and strengthened the clause boundary definition. The overall experience with the AI extraction piece remained a focus, and Lumeris was impressed with the level of accuracy and efficiency provided by the solution. The solution provided a reliable way to manage third-party contracts, empowering Lumeris to bring common sense back to the business of healthcare. 

Third Party Contract Terms Identification and Complex Clause Analysis 

The solution provides accurate contract terms identification and clause boundary definition, ensuring that each clause is clearly defined and accurately interpreted. Aavenir Contractflow uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to accurately identify and extract metadata from complex clauses, streamlining the contract management process.  

The AI-driven solution provides Lumeris with the confidence they need to accurately interpret each clause, leading to a clearer understanding of the contract’s contents. By strengthening clause boundary definition, Lumeris is able to reduce the risk of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, improving their overall contract management process. 

Timely Auto-Renewal of required Contracts 

Aavenir Contractflow enables timely auto-renewal with defined renewal terms where no manual intervention is required. 

Automated Workflows 

By automating workflows for value-based healthcare contracting, Lumeris was able to significantly reduce the time it took to process contracts. With the help of Aavenir Contractflow solution, contracts were automatically routed to the appropriate parties for review and approval, ensuring that the contract turnaround time was reduced from weeks to just a few days. This reduced the risk of non-compliance and potential penalties. 

Automated workflows enabled better collaboration between different departments involved in the contract management process. The solution provided a single platform for all stakeholders to track the progress of contracts, share comments and feedback, and ensure that all parties were on the same page. 

Automated Alerts and Real-time Updates 

The solution provided automated alerts for missing information or potential errors, reducing the risk of costly mistakes and legal disputes. Further, real-time updates on the progress of contracts enabled Lumeris to identify bottlenecks and take corrective actions as needed. 

Vendor Soft-Onboarding 

Along with streamlined Request to Contract Management Process- Aavenir Contractflow solution enable Lumeris to do soft-onboarding to its vendors while having required review process in place.  

With Aavenir Contractflow, now Lumeris can submit contract requests, and review the counterparty’s information electronically. This electronic review includes necessary audit trails from the required teams, ensuring transparency and accountability. Once the request completes its process, Aavenir Contractflow seamlessly creates or updates vendor details in the Service Vendor Master, which serves as a core component of Lumeris’ system. This helps not only simplify the vendor management process but also improves overall efficiency. 

The experience with Lumeris was interesting for Aavenir’s Professional Services team as it brought various new ways of bringing some simple but effective use cases around UX. Lumeris acknowledged those custom bytes on ServiceNow that only added flavor to the strong product on the platform. By partnering with Aavenir, Lumeris was able to enhance their contract management process, bringing more value to their business and their patients.

Key Results

In just 1-month post soft launch of Contractflow 4.5, the latest NOW version – San Diego, they were able to successfully streamline contract lifecycle management by implementing Aavenir Contractflow on the Now Platform. 

Champion Petfoods Streamlined Sourcing Process with Digitized and Automated RFQ Workflows

About Company

Champion Petfoods is known for its award-winning pet food brands, including Orijen and Acana. Founded in 1985, Champion Petfoods produces high-quality pet food using natural, wholesome, locally sourced ingredients whenever possible. Their pet food is made in their kitchens, allowing for complete quality control. They also firmly commit to sustainability and use renewable energy sources to power their facilities.

Client’s RFx Management Challenges

Champion Petfoods, until now, resorted to tedious juggling of emails and Excel to connect and manage vendors for the quarterly sourcing of raw material . As a result, they observed an utterly manual process from shortlisting, supplier response consolidation, and evaluation to awarding that gave way to errors and time-consuming sourcing cycles. They also followed the tedious task of manually rolling out the event.

Subsequently, this process made it difficult for an organization to understand and compare ingredients from vendors they want to compare and bid award for.   

Their existing process needed more visibility at different sourcing stages. And everything being manual led to challenges for them in historical data consolidation. Moreover, it severely impacted management and their decision-making too.   

Key challenges include:

“We always had to manually create, edit, deliver, organize, and evaluate our RFx process. Aavenir has saved us countless hours of administrative work. The tool has also allowed us to focus on other tasks instead of organizing responses and dealing with email chains. Everything is organized in one place now, and we can respond to suppliers twice as fast.” – Gary Richard, Procurement Manager, Champion Petfoods.

The Solution: Aavenir AI-enabled RFx Management Solution for Champion Petfoods Company 

Aavenir streamlined the RFX process for Champion Petfoods’s RFQ with RFPflow.   

From drafting a request for quotes to reviewing responses to shortlisting and awarding, now everything can be performed in RFPflow, skipping the long excels.    

Automate Processes   

Aavenir RFPflow product extended an easy direct procurement experience to Champion buyers. In addition, the extended product capability from drafting and publishing to awarding at the ingredient level for multiple suppliers enabled Champions Petfood to plan various events across multiple commodities.   

Aavenir RFPflow streamlines the RFX process by automating manual processes, including drafting questionnaires, collecting responses, and segregating the award system based on the ingredient choices within the RFPflow tool in a few clicks. In addition, the cumbersome process of maintaining long Excel sheets is now automated, saving sourcing cycle time.      

Higher Visibility   

Aavenir RFPflow offers transparency on how things function at various stages, especially during evaluation. With a constant reflection of any changes captured dynamically, the tool provided real-time updates for any responses received or submitted by the suppliers.  

With the ability to refer to the historical data at the commodity level and even trace it back to two consecutive years in the past, the evaluator can refer to the differences observed in YOY and thus have the negotiations managed for the currently active event.  

With the savings calculation and currency conversion available, the evaluation process only sharpens, giving solid benchmarking and scoring for awarding.    

Increase Efficiency  

Aavenir RFPflow helps consolidates all sourcing-related data, making the consolidation and comparison exercise quicker and more efficient. The evaluator can refer to the differences observed in YOY and thus have the negotiations managed for the currently active event. 

Flexibility to Award  

Aavenir RFPflow offers flexibility to award at the ingredient level across multiple suppliers, making it easier to manage and compare ingredients from vendors based on the food production requirements. 

Key Results 

Is your organization experiencing similar challenges? We can help you simulate how AI-enabled, automated RFX solution can make your sourcing process seamless & error-free. BOOK A DEMO>>

American Seafoods Group (ASG) dynamically improved its invoice processing and automated manual tasks to nullify errors with visibility into workflows

About Company

American Seafoods Group (ASG) is the world’s largest at-sea processor of Wild Alaska Pollock, with its high-quality products distributed globally since 1988. It also holds the largest Wild Pacific Hake (Whiting) allocation. . They were one of the pioneers who helped revolutionize how fisheries are managed in the United States. Today it produces up to 150 MT of seafood daily.

Client’s Invoice Management Challenges

Until now, American Seafood Group, as an organization, used to manage 24000 invoices manually over the year. The invoices received through emails were scanned, printed, signed, and approved. The invoice process was cumbersome and involved much paperwork. In addition, numerous manual interventions resulted in issues such as invoice matching errors, discrepancies, more extended approval, and delayed payment cycles, leading to strained supplier relationships.   

Moreover, the process involved multiple departments (individual companies of ASG) and members without much visibility of timely approvals and supplier payments. The invoices were sent manually to various departments and people involved in the processing cycle. With the involvement of multiple stakeholders, the probability of duplicate invoices was always high. Also, there was a waste of time in the absence of defined workflows. 

Key Challenges include:

“Aavenir Invoiceflow has improved our efficiency with seamless vendor collaboration, zeroing duplicate invoices, and manual invoice management. Integrating the SAP accounting system has further enhanced accrual reporting and timely payments, giving way to supplier discounts. – Accounts Payable Team”.

The Solution: Aavenir AI-enabled Invoice Management Solution for Seafood Processing Company 

Aavenir streamlined the invoicing and AP processes on ServiceNow for ASG by tapping into their ERPs, i.e., SAP & operational software AMOS.   

As a result, we kicked off the systematic approach for ASG, where all invoices will hit the mailbox and get automatically mapped according to the information.   

Defined mailbox for each company 

Aavenir created mailboxes based on the company and vendor/department mapping. The invoices received are routed automatically to the AP Team and department heads. The AP team will check the coding and cost allocation on Invoices before sending them out. The double-check system assures everything that goes to the supplier is discrepancy-proof with quicker approvals.   

Leverage the usage of AI – Extraction & Mapping 

The Aavenir’s intelligent AI engine simplified processes by capturing information on a particular invoice. It allowed automatic extraction and update of multiple line items and fields to map them as relevant. Further, assigning the invoice to a specific user group reduces manual entries and human errors. In addition, the touchless processing and data extraction streamline the invoice approval process for ASG. 

Transparency in invoice processing 

Aavenir Invoiceflow has powered ASG with clear and complete visibility of invoices, their status, and lifecycle for each department and every approver involved. It ensures that the correct invoice payment goes to each supplier without over or underpayment—the automated invoice processing solution checks for duplicate or delayed payments. Further, the automated 2-way matching identifies disparities.  

Task automation  

Aavenir Invoiceflow automates the monotonous task of reviewing, mapping, and approving invoices. There is a minimum human intervention with the three implemented workflows, which revolve around PO/NON-PO based and one customized workflow, mainly covering the invoices for operational services/purchases.  

Key Results 

The quick implementation of Aavenir Invoiceflow built on ServiceNow enabled American Seafoods Group with remarkable results in a short period.  

Is your organization experiencing similar challenges? We can help you simulate how AI-enabled, automated invoice processing can make your invoicing process seamless & error-free. BOOK A DEMO>>

A Leading Investment Venture Amplified its Strategic Advisory and Augmented its Productivity with AP Automation and Real-Time Invoice Visibility

About Company

A 30-year-old Strategic Advisory organization, that has capitalized on the inefficiencies and opportunities within the market since its inception, amplified its strategic advisory, and augmented its productivity with automation and real-time visibility of the Accounts Payable Processes. The client organization helps maximize the business value of global portfolio managers keen on devising strategies with extended support and autonomy.  In addition, the company has diversified investments in infrastructure, risk analytics, proprietary technology, and, more significantly, in America, Europe, and Asia. 

Client’s Invoice Management Challenges

The company had to manage around 15000 invoices manually across the year. Until now, the organization would carry out accounting and payable processes by adding all the data manually. The IT or SNOW team would create the Purchase Requisition (PR) in the system and send it to the concerned team for further processing. No dedicated individual was assigned to perform invoice matching, including coding or approval. In short, the entire process was a little cumbersome. 

Further, with the advent of multiple global investors, managing invoices and the AP processes got chaotic for the organization.

“There was a predominance of manual work in the purchasing department, from filling OCR sheets to assigning GL codes for every product to verification of hardcopies that accompany invoices,” said Procurement Manager. She also added, “Mundane tasks created monotony, resulting in a time crunch and enhanced scope of error – impacting productivity”.

A purchase request (PR) was generated on the basis of which an invoice was generated. They had only a 2-way check wherein they matched with the invoice and purchase requisition, not the purchase order.  

The staff had to undergo a manual process that required creating a PR in ServiceNow. Once created, the SNOW Team would send it to the AP mailbox of the concerned team, which underwent manual monitoring for matching to checking the SNOW requisition number. It made the management of multiple invoices a little too complex.

All invoice types, including PR, non-PR consulting, and non-consulting, had different workflows for approval. The invoices were sent manually to various departments and people for support. In the absence of defined workflows, it killed time and transparency.

THE AAVENIR APPROACH & SOLUTION

Aavenir AI-enabled Invoice Management Solution for Investment Management

Aavenir streamlined the invoicing and AP processes on ServiceNow for the client organization by eliminating the manual processes and moving towards greater visibility and significant optimization of PR in SNOW for matching purposes. As a result, we kicked off the systematic approach for them, where all invoices will hit the mailbox and get automatically mapped according to the information. 

Leverage the Usage of AI – Smart Invoice Capture

The Aavenir AI engine simplified processes for multiple invoices flow by allowing automatic extraction and updation of multiple line items and fields, mapping them to the right accounting code, thereby reducing manual entries and human errors. 

“I have a quality of life now. Handling the procure-to-pay alone has never been this effortless. I can imagine everything that I was doing manually is now happening automatically with the Aavenir AI engine.  Delighted and relieved that team Aavenir could understand the typical industry needs and supported me throughout. I am spellbound to witness how the Aavenir navigated through and tried to gauge everyones’ needs from the quick conversations,” said Procurement Manager.

Aavenir AI-driven Invoiceflow with data extraction and touchless processing worked as a catalyst in the invoice approval process for the client organization. 

Benefits:

Simplified Processes for Multiple Invoice Flow

Aavenir InvoiceFlow solution powered the client organization with complete visibility of Invoices with their status and overall invoice lifecycle, thereby ensuring efficiency and transparency.

Cost center allocations and multiple line items mapping to respective General Ledger(GL) codes has been implemented to simplify invoice processing. We have utilized all the multiple invoice categories in their accounting system to fit into our unified product. 

Benefits:

Task Automation

Aavenir Invoiceflow automates the humdrum task of reviewing, mapping, and disbursing invoices. With the seamless integration, all invoices are ready for at the disposal of accounts that need just a glance and hit submit. 

Benefits:

Key Results

The quick implementation of Aavenir Invoiceflow built on ServiceNow enabled the client organization with remarkable results in a short period.

Aavenir Expedites Non-PO Invoice Approvals and Payments with Aavenir Invoiceflow on ServiceNow

About Company

Based in Texas, US, and  Ahmedabad, India, Aavenir delivers the future of work with its industry-agnostic AI-driven Source-to-Pay solutions, built on the NOW platform. With a vision to solve the complex Source-to-Pay challenges across various industries, Aavenir’s next-gen Source-to-Pay suite revolutionizes age-old procurement processes by using the latest Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technologies to reduce cycle time while offering insightful best practices suggestions based on historical data. Aavenir’s customer base is spread across the globe; to name a few, The State-of-Utah, Express Professionals, T.D.Williamson.

Why Aavenir Invoiceflow for Aavenir?

It’s all about putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes to use and experience our own solutions and workflows. With the active usage of Invoiceflow in our day-to-day operations, we can see exactly what it’s like to harness the power of ServiceNow workflows and Invoiceflow features the way our users do. We are able to realize the value it brings to the table.

At Aavenir, we believe that Invoicelfow is the only and one of the most unique AP automation solutions built on the NOW platform. It can have a lot of potential users and use cases. For example, Invoiceflow can solve day-to-day challenges for AP Managers, CFOs, Vendor Managers, Contract Managers, and many others. Whether one is responsible for creating invoices, approving invoices, matching with PO, or processing the payment on time with zero errors, Invoiceflow has the capability to do so.

Invoice Management Use Cases

Multiple Vendor Invoices Processing

At Aavenir, the team is globally distributed and works remotely. As the Aavenir has grown so has the number of PDF and paper invoices it receives. There are invoices coming from consultants, vendors, contractors, and others.  Top of it, most of the invoices are non-PO-based. 

Deciding how to route non-PO invoices can be extremely challenging, especially since these invoices frequently fail to include information vital to routing. They typically undergo a tedious review and approval process – which is almost manual and lengthy. 

This all called for a dire need to automate invoice approval workflows. Aavenir Invoiceflow lets teams collaborate and quickly resolve exceptions and approvals while gaining greater transparency into how invoicing processes are executed. 

Multi-Currency Approvals and Payments

Aavenir’s team is globally distributed. The payments are done in USD as well as INR. Multi-currency processing involves a complex setup of different billing currencies. 

For real-time invoice tracking and visibility, there was a need for a system that lets the enterprise transact business in any number of global currencies while maintaining core financial records in a single, functional currency.

“We have been providing best-in-class accounting & finance outsourcing services to more than 100 companies worldwide. However, using Aavenir Invoiceflow for Aavenir to process payments has literally made our AP team’s life easier than ever. The ease of use, accurate AI extraction, and multi-currency processing has definitely saved more than it costs to us.”

–   Tushar Shah, CA, Co-Founder & Partner, Khandar Mehta & Shah.

The Solution: Aavenir Accounts Payable Automation Solution for SaaS Industry

Aavenir Invoiceflow is already solving complex invoice management challenges for the organizations like The State of Utah, Schonfeld, T.D. Williamson and many others. In its own case too, Aavenir decided to use its own robust AP automation solution as its ‘first choice’ to automate and streamline invoice processing on ServiceNow. 

Accelerated Invoice Processing 

One-click Approval_Aavenir Invoiceflow

Invoiceflow accurately processes multi-format invoices received from multiple sources. Consultants, contractors, freelancers, and others raise invoices in the Aavenir Invoiceflow and an automated email is sent directly to the approver. There is no need for an Accounts Executive to get involved at this stage, unlike in the case of manual processes. This Vendor to Department Head mapping availability brings seamless experience in straight-through processing of invoices. 

The approver gets an alert in their email to validate the invoice and approve/reject the due payment. Once the invoice (PO based as well as non-PO based) is approved and digitally signed, the accounts department gets notified and they process the payment –  the entire process is based on one-click approval, which has accelerated invoice processing by 60%.

Multi-Currency Compliant

Invoices are usually raised by the consultants, partners, and other team members spread across the globe. Aavenir Invoiceflow supports one-off invoicing, respecting specific national and international rules and currencies, and fully automates recurring payment workflows. It supports delivering tax invoices in more than 10 currencies so you can display customers’ native currency. Furthermore, AI-powered accuracy and efficiency allow users to raise invoices per their base location’s currency and provide you with two primary payment methods to choose from for domestic and international payments.

Tax Compliant

Aavenir AI engine uses its basic tax calculation engine (including IGST, CGST, SGST) or external tax provider and applies the correct tax rate to every invoice item – displays the right tax amount and is fully compliant. It automatically allocates multiple tax rates at the Line Level and seamlessly interacts with 3rd Party Tax engines or ERP updates.

Intuitive Invoice Management Dashboards

Get to see pending, approved, and paid invoices and identify bottlenecks in invoice processing and help stakeholders get real-time insights into their total invoice volume, and prioritize critical invoices with Intuitive and personalized invoice dashboards. 

Key Results

Aavenir Invoiceflow_Process Flow

After digitizing the AP process with Aavenir, our consolidated end-to-end invoice processing on ServiceNow has resulted in key benefits such as:

We at Aavenir have made our Accounts Payable process seamless with Aavenir Invoiceflow. If you wish to maximize efficiency for your AP team, Book a Demo to know how Aavenir AP Automation Solution can help overcome your business’s unique AP challenges.

 

The State of Utah processes IT Vendor Invoices 5X faster with full control and visibility over spend

About Company

Nestled in the mountains and valleys, the State of Utah is one of the best-managed states in the United States of America. Division of Technology Services (DTS) of Utah government delivers innovative, convenient, secure, and cost-effective solutions that empower partners to simplify lives of Utah residents.

Invoice Management Challenges

DTS uses ServiceNow to evaluate business cases for IT related projects or purchases, including internal apps, software licenses, fixed assets, and other IT products or services. The DTS Finance team then evaluates the business case, manages purchase requisitions (PO), and invoice payments using in-house tools along with custom applications and tables built on ServiceNow.

SoU works with 600+ IT vendors that send 8000+ paper-based invoices per year with multiple invoice attachments per email or post. The manual coding and data entry of thousands of IT invoices with multiple line items and varied payment terms was very tedious and error-prone. The SoU’s finance team had one person manually matching invoice data with PO, receipts, and vendor data.

The SoU finance team had the most trouble getting a PO issued against random and ad-hoc hardware or software purchasing from 10-12 vendors. On the other hand, the receiving center could only really update receipts for hardware purchases. The purchases of software or services still had to be manually checked over the emails saying- “Hey, did you receive X services?”.

“SoU had a custom-built purchase application on ServiceNow, which runs to our expectations. However, we knew that building an AI-enabled invoice processing solution on ServiceNow and integrating it to our purchasing system was definitely going to be a time-consuming project, which would need skilled ServiceNow resources.” said Tyrel King, Financial Manager II at the SoU – DTS.

The Solution: Aavenir Accounts Payable Automation Solution for Government Sector

SoU implemented Aavenir Invoiceflow on their existing Now platform to streamline the Accounts payable for IT vendors. Now, 100% of IT vendor invoices are stored on ServiceNow on the day of receipt using Aavenir’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

AI-enabled invoice data entry and matching: 

Aavenir Invoiceflow’s AI-engine learns the unique invoice patterns and automates invoice coding and data entry for thousands of invoices. Built with the latest machine learning technologies, Aavenir offers 80% accurate data entry. Aavenir automatically validates the invoice data with purchase order tables on ServiceNow and Vendor data using custom rules. SoU has implemented a custom PO-matching workflow per procurement category.

Frictionless invoice approval workflow: 

After the invoice data is captured, the DTS Finance team reviews the invoice and adds header details if needed. Invoices over a certain threshold amount or specific purchase categories are then routed for faster approvals by one or more approvers using the ServiceNow-powered most advanced and easily configurable workflow engine.

Exception handling workflow: 

If needed, approvers can reroute invoices for exception handling for certain cases such as invoice amount is different than PO, duplicate invoice number, and more. For non-PO invoice, Aavenir automatically initiates a request to assign a cost center. Based on the cost center and the invoice line items, Aavenir then automatically creates a purchase requisition. 

Invoice payments: 

After the invoice is approved, Aavenir Invoiceflow offers a way to enter invoice information in SoU’s existing payment system FiNeT. After the payment, it automatically updates the status in Aavenir Invoiceflow with the payment information. 

Key Results

After digitizing AP process with Aavenir, SoU consolidated end-to-end invoice processing on ServiceNow with key benefits such as: 

5x faster data entry: 

AI-enabled automated invoice data entry has drastically reduced time from hours to minutes. And, that’s a huge value add because it gives the finance team near real-time insight into all invoices and they can manage cash flow better.

70% faster invoice lifecycle: 

SoU’s finance team took up to 10 days to process an invoice with a potential risk of late payments, duplicate payments, or lost discounts. With Aavenir, it’s been shortened to about 1 day per approver, so 2 to 3 days total in most cases – that’s a 70% reduction in the invoice lifecycle.

Better collaboration between remote teams: 

Amidst COVID-19, the AP team worked remotely and began requesting electronic approvals over long email chains. Aavenir provided full control over invoice lifecycle with smart, intuitive, and actionable AP workflows that enabled frictionless communication between AP and other business departments.

Complete spend visibility: 

Aavenir Invoiceflow dashboard gave a complete visibility of invoices by status (pending/overdue / or other), invoices by procurement category, by the vendor, and so forth.

 

Express Professionals Achieves Contract Visibility for Services Agreement

About Company

Founded in 1983, Express Employment Professionals serves customers globally through a network of more than 850 franchise locations worldwide. 

Express used Symfact as their primary contract management solution to manage all the service agreements, vendor, franchise, and employee agreements. With an increasing number of contracts and limited functionality in Symfact, contract managers at Express wanted to achieve a single source of truth for all their service agreements and contracts, and also simplify the contract authoring and storage. 

Moreover, Symfact is an OnPrem contract solution making it challenging to work across borders, and needed a cloud-based contract management solution. Also, the contract managers wanted to implement role-based contract access with streamlined contract audits that comply with their monthly, quarterly compliance schedules. 

Key Contract Management Challenges

We work with 800+ vendors and recruitment partners, making it challenging to get visibility for contracts created, canceled, processed, and signed. We are looking to adopt AI and get contract visibility across all the agreements which lacked in the on-premises contract management solution. Another challenge for Aavenir’s team was to abstract and migrate all the legacy contracts to the ServiceNow platform shared with the customer.

The key challenges include:

001 Jared Mashaney
“Since implementing Aavenir Contractflow in 2021, we’ve seen a remarkable 66 percent acceleration in the legal review process at Express Pros. The user-friendly interface of Aavenir has made it easy for our team to adapt, requiring minimal training. What used to take days for legal reviews now only takes hours, greatly benefiting our franchisees. I wholeheartedly recommend the Aavenir team for their responsiveness and unwavering support—they always prioritize our needs!“

–Jared Mashaney
VP of Legal & Asst. General Counsel, Express Employment International

The Solution: Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management Solution for Professional Services

Express’ service agreements are managed in Symfact, and all the data needed to be migrated to the ServiceNow platform as it offers more flexibility. Aavenir Contractflow is an AI-enabled cloud-based contract management solution built natively on the ServiceNow platform delivering Microsoft Word enabled contract authoring, secure storage, and advanced contract reports with contract audit dashboards. Additionally, they wanted to simplify the contract workflow process, keeping the entire contracting process streamlined in a single system. Moreover, contract redlining and editing contract agreements were easy with Aavenir Word add-in.

AI-enabled Contract Authoring + Centralization 

Express can create multiple service agreements and consolidate all contracts in a centralized repository on Now Platform with enhanced contract search functionality. AI helped to create contracts directly from emails and other digital documents, simplifying the contract authoring cycle. 

Cancel Contracts with Flexible Workflows

Some of the service agreements were required to be canceled in real-time which was achieved with Aavenir Contractflow. Also, the solution offered custom contract processing workflows based on the vendor type. The signing of contracts was implemented to capture both wet and e-signatures.

Renaming Contracts with Drag n Drop Contract Creation from Attachment

Express’ contract management team needed to create agreements on the fly, so a custom implementation was enabled in Aavenir Contractflow where users can create agreements by simply drag-n-drop of email attachments and the AI would create contracts on the fly. This shortens the contract creation time and proper contract version controls were maintained in the centralized contract management system. Renaming contract agreements were also implemented in the Aavenir Contractflow solution to maximize efficiency and reduce contract creation time.

Contract Reports & Dashboards 

Aavenir Contractflow offered custom contract dashboards providing contract visibility for key metrics like contract by month, contract cycle time report for individual contract types, contract due to renewal, upcoming renewals, total spend by vendor, total spend by status, and more. 

Key Results

Express Professionals and Aavenir teams went through a series of sessions for successful implementation and adoption. And, it wasn’t long before they saw the benefits of using Aavenir Contractflow.

 

Leading investor services provider manages SLAs with secure and centralized contracts

About Company

One of the world’s top 10 financial groups with a presence in more than 40 countries supports businesses with a range of tailor-made financial services and corporate banking products.

The firm’s Investor services subsidiary provides asset administrative services to investment and asset management companies around the world, offering a broad array of services – for managing thousands of funds and multiple alternative asset classes, in all major jurisdictions worldwide.

Contract Management Challenges

The Investor services provider manages various types of services agreements, process frameworks, fee agreements, and other contractual documents per customer. These multipage documents prepared in form of spreadsheets, PDF, or MS Word were being stored in multiple repositories and shared folders. The firm’s advisors need to manually compile all documents, monitor SLAs, and define the actions. This involved maintaining various spreadsheets, copying and pasting data into a master document, categorizing terms, formatting the report, and sending a PDF to the clients. Each contract has multiple SLAs and monitoring compliance using spreadsheets and ad-hoc tools was not effective. All told, each report could take as long as an hour to produce, and a separate report had to be created for hundreds of clients every month.

Part of the challenge was to ensure a high level of security, full transparency, and compliance with IT guidelines for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and AML/KYC legislation, the firm was looking for a solution that can offer a highly secure contract repository and digital workflows without compromising the user experience.

 

“Our organization was riddled with the challenges of retrieving contracts, manually compiling all related documents, monitoring SLAs or the key terms associated with contract documents, and defining financial action plans. We needed a solution that would help us reconcile all documents and SLAs per customer, and that’s when we looked at Aavenir. We found Aavenir was super easy to use and addressed our complex security concerns with contract storage. Because it is built on ServiceNow, it offered a quick setup and we expect it would bring immense visibility into contract management process down the line.”

– Director technology business management, operations & financial manager 
at the world’s leading finance group

 

The Solution: Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management for Financial Services

The firm was heavily using ServiceNow as their underlying technology platform for multiple enterprise applications and turned to Aavenir Contractflow to centralize all contractual documents and reduce manual efforts in monitoring SLAs tied to contracts.

Highly secure contract repository:

Having Contractflow on their existing Now platform keeps sensitive information secure — because the data never leaves ServiceNow.The firm’s IT audit team and Aavenir successfully sailed through different stages of security and risk audit of the application before go-live. The process involved a complete IT audit of information security and preparation of documents such as software design, dependencies, administration, security & governance guidelines, and much more.

Full-text contract search:

Contract managers can now perform a Google-like wildcard search across contracts using any keyword or filter contracts by contract type or customer name – with the click of a button.

Ease of contract creation:

The firm easily configured a number of custom field-based forms and document templates to be used to enter client information, contact details, related SLAs, action plans steps and benchmarks, and other details while contract creation.

Faster and automated reporting:

Rather than the contract managers manually creating each report from scratch and updating spreadsheets each time, Aavenir dashboards and reports do the work for them. The firm can track deliverables, monitor SLAs, and key obligations per customer, and identify the volume of contracts in approval or sent for signing.

Key Results

After a detailed IT audit process, the firm on-boarded Aavenir Contractflow through a series of sessions for successful implementation and adoption. Within a short time, they realized the following key benefits of using Aavenir Contractflow.

The single version of the truth:

Having centralized contracts using Contractflow on the unified Now platform made the process standardized, secure, and easy to maintain. It will also allow low-code/no-code integrations with other systems to maintain a single version of the truth.

Massive time savings in contract management:

Team members who once spent days working on manual documentation can now monitor SLAs, and develop financial action plans within a couple of hours/one hour to 30 secs.

Increased visibility to SLAs:

Contract managers can easily track all SLAs’ details and identify the stage the SLA is in and if it has not complied. The SLA log details help understand the progress of an SLA and the amount of time required to complete the task.

 

A leading Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) Automated IT Vendor Invoice Data Extraction and PO Matching on ServiceNow

About Company

In a world in which healthcare is increasingly complicated, a North America-based leading Pharmacy Benefits Manager (PBM) helps patients achieve exceptional medication adherence and best-possible clinical results by providing members with more than 66,000 retail pharmacies across the U.S.; mail-order prescription services with the capacity to fulfill more than 15 million prescriptions per year. A wholly-owned specialty pharmacy focuses on expensive specialized drugs; and highly targeted pharmacy programs for Diabetes, Hepatitis C, and Opioids to balance optimal clinical outcomes with minimized plan costs.

For 25 years, a full-service PBM serves a wide range of clients, including employers, hospital and health systems, unions, TPAs, state and local government, and health planners.

Vendor Invoice Management Challenges

PBM is managing various IT systems provided by multiple IT vendors including IT infrastructure service providers, healthcare software system providers, laptops, and other IT hardware providers. Most of these IT vendors are managed using ServiceNow; the IT department orders directly with vendors and finance had no insight into its accounts payable (AP) pipeline.

There was no centralized storage of IT purchase invoices data. Manual validation of all invoices with PO was time-consuming and resulting in long approval cycles. To shorten the invoice approval lifecycle, PBM wanted a solution that would integrate with its existing IT vendor management system, ServiceNow.

 

“We had no visibility into IT expenditure until we manually extract data from all invoices, which usually takes weeks. With 100+ monthly invoices arriving by email or directly generated by systems, gathering all invoices’ data and manually processing invoices was really slow and error-prone. We needed a technology solution that can not only automate invoice data extraction but also support their unique invoice approval workflow requirements.”

– IT Vendor Manager
at the Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) Company

 

Aavenir Invoiceflow Solution: IT Vendor Invoice Processing

PBM is using multiple ServiceNow packaged applications including ITSM, CSM, and procurement. Hence, having Aavenir Invoiceflow on ServiceNow was the obvious choice as they can consolidate vendor information, POs, and invoices on ServiceNow. It helped them with the following:

Automated Historical Invoice Data Validation

PBM started using Aavenir Invoiceflow for processing 3 years’ historical invoices. With the Aavenir team’s support in invoice coding and they could achieve automated invoice data extraction with up to 70% accuracy.

2-way Invoice Data Matching with PO:

Aavenir’s configuration engineer could quickly set up business validations rules for automatic 2-way invoice data matching with POs stored in IT Services Management (ITSM) App on ServiceNow. Aavenir also helped set up a completely customized 5-stage complex invoice approval workflow to handle different types of invoice mismatches.

Invoice Approval Workflow

In just 2 weeks, the Aavenir team could help PBM to set up really complex 5-stage invoice approval workflow for all future invoice processing; involving multiple stakeholders and custom business rules using Aavenir Invoiceflow on ServiceNow.

Invoice Status Reports and Spend Analytics

Aavenir Invoiceflow provided complete visibility into all invoices by vendor, by business unit, or by cost center. PBM team is now able to monitor all invoices’ status and monthly trends (in $ and volume) using the dashboard and reports on ServiceNow.

Key Results

PBM’s all IT invoices processing is managed by Aavenir Invoiceflow. As a result, they could achieve the following:

Future Roadmap

PBM wants to leverage AI features of Aavenir Invoiceflow to implement complete auto-posting of all invoices. After the successful automation of all IT Invoices, PBM would like to extend Aavenir Invoiceflow’s capabilities to automate invoice processing for many other departments.

 

T. D. Williamson Gains Full Control into Invoice Process with Aavenir Invoiceflow

About Company

T.D. Williamson (TDW) is the most trusted manufacturers and services organization serving the pipeline industry worldwide for over 100 years. TDW’s global portfolio of products and services includes advanced isolation, integrated pigging, and integrity assessment solutions for both onshore and offshore applications. TDW has partnered in the oil and gas industry to deliver innovative solutions that maximize uptime, improve throughput, avoid a shutdown and minimize risk for customers worldwide.

Key Invoice Processing Challenges

TDW’s accounting team processes and manages approximately 50,000-60,000 invoices per year received at 7 different email inboxes associated with respective business units, but much of its AP processes were manual. Each invoice had to be manually coded and routed for approval. There have been instances where multiple copies of the same invoice(s) received in different inboxes resulting in possibilities of duplicate payment. Additionally, each mailbox has multiple approvers including the AP team and business team resulting in a long invoice approval cycle.

Moreover, manual validation of invoice information with the POs from 5000+ vendors worldwide is a time-consuming process. TDW needed a faster and more accurate way to match invoice data against PO and vendor information stored in ServiceNow Vendor Management Application.

 

“We had a very manual process for receiving, coding, and processing our accounts payable invoices. Most of the activity was email-based and had very limited tracking or the ability to measure where we were in the process. This could result in lost, late, or delayed invoices. We wanted a future-proof solution to automate invoice coding and reduce invoice approvals time.

Accounts Payable was a very time-consuming process for all the groups involved in the invoice process, not just the AP group. A lot of time is spent following up on payments or researching the coding and approval requirements and manually governing delegation of authority rules. A few of the features that drew our interest to Aavenir were their understanding of the procure-to-pay processes, the machine learning capabilities of the platform, and the ease of making adjustments to meet our needs. One of the best experiences we had with this process was working with the Aavenir implementation team. They have been a pleasure to work with and were very accommodating in our efforts.”

– Greg Rice
Director for Global Applications at T.D. Williamson

 

The Solution: Invoice Automation for Manufacturing

Rather than bringing in different technology, TDW wanted to rationalize existing applications and expand the ServiceNow platform capabilities with the resources’ expertise that they have. Ultimately, TDW chose Aavenir because it was built on ServiceNow, which is a core foundational platform for TDW. Aavenir Invoiceflow quickly automated the AP process, leveraging AI for invoice coding, categorization, approver selection, and sending approved invoices for payment.

Invoice Receipt and Automated Invoice Coding

After the implementation of Invoiceflow, all invoices were received in a single inbox. Using AI, Invoiceflow reads information from one or more documents (PDFs, images, excel) per invoice, finds important line items in each invoice document, organizes invoices into useful categories, and makes them easy to access on ServiceNow.

Improved Invoice Visibility with Dashboards

With Aavenir Invoiceflow, there was a single system of record for all Invoices. This helped in the tracking of invoices and achieving cost savings opportunities. Now AP team can measure the performance of the invoice process with dashboards and identify bottlenecks before they occur.

PO and Non-PO Invoice Approval Workflow

Aavenir Invoiceflow manages end-to-end invoice processing workflow and routes approval requests for PO and non-PO invoices using a pre-defined approval matrix and re-routes the request in case of a proxy, out of office, or escalation. The solution sends automated reminders to stakeholders for pending invoice approvals, early payment discounts, due dates, and more.