Background

• As a leader in Hot Rolled Coil production, Northstar Bluescope had undertaken doubling its output capacity.
• As product volumes increased so did the volume of AP transactions that needed to be processed and while staffing up these areas or outsourcing were options, Northstar was looking for a solution that could support this volume while redirecting their resources to more value added work.

Challenge

• For most basic materials producers, automating Ap data capture presents a triple challenge:
• 1. A large number of suppliers with different formats.
• 2. A variety of types of materials, some of them discrete units, some of them received in bulk and paid according to the weight of the receiving scale, and some of them paid based on a formula that takes into account the received tare weight, the contents of particular elements (for example in ferroalloys) and specific pricing indices.
• 3. Interfacing with legacy ERP systems which may not have native API capabilities
• In addition to the above, the system had to be able to handle invoices where there may not be a PO
• Despite the common approach of undertaking months-long, and expensive, discovery to compile business requirements, this approach often fails to capture all the complexities and nuances involved in the actual operations.
• Northstar was looking for a deployment model that could start providing fast relief and adapt as new vendors were added to the automation effort.

How we solved this

• Simplify'd Intelligent Documents Platform was built exactly to tackle these problems.
• It has out of the box capabilities to handle all the use cases that we have encountered in our work with basic materials producers and it excels at allowing incremental additions of vendors.
• Furthermore, its 3-way matching and reporting modules are easy to customize to tackle specific message configurations -like XML, JSON etc- and it has unparalleled capabilities to interpret documents and carry out complex data transformations.
• Finally, it is cpable of configuring end to end document workflows to handle everything from email attachment extraction to matching of invoices and support documents to create audit-ready archives.

Engagement Model

• The solution was deployed as a cloud-based fully managed service.
• We had a series of 4 hour-long meeting to define intitial interface requirements; set thresholds for approval of differences between order, receiving, and invoice; establishtype of messages required according to potential cases (unit price differences, quantity differences, etc), and segment the vendors by type and volume of transactions.
• Testing on the initial group of vendors commenced within 2 weeks later. As a fully managed service, the Simplify'd team handled all the onboarding of vendors.

Results

• The Northstar team is currently handling the incremental transactions associated with the expansion of capacity with only 20% of the staffing they had prior to the implementation.
• New vendors and cases are handled as part of regular business
• As business processes and requirements evolve, the platform has been able to accomodate changes in requirements