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:

• 70% accuracy in automated invoices data extraction and onboarding into ServiceNow
• Saved up to 5 min of manual effort per invoice coding
  • Saved hours of finding invoices lost in email inboxes
• Single source of truth for vendor, purchase order, and invoice information
• 80% reduction in the invoice lifecycle timeline
  • Reduced invoice approval time
  • Automated notification for pending invoice approvals and reviews from different stakeholders
• Real-time Spend analytics
  • Real-time invoice status monitoring
  • Auto-generation of quarterly and monthly reports

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.