Invoice Processing on ServiceNow
Project Expenses Visibility
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.
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
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.
