Background

• For steel producers, managing freight payables is a large-volume operation with a number of complexities.
• The high weight density of the product results in hundreds of individual shipments per day by rail and truck.
• Each shipment has typically a set of support documents and requires the freight company to provide a proof of delivery together with their invoice.
• Additionally, its common for some steel makers to have secondary operations performed by third parties on their product and then ship the product to the end customer.
• This results in multiple invoices for a single shipment which all need to be correctly tracked and assigned to the specific coil or pipe produced.

Challenges

• Our client back-office operations were bursting at the seams, a recent expansion nearly doubled the volume of shipments, the staff was barley keeping up, and a planned increase in product sold with secondary operations performed by third parties was likely to exacerbate the situation.
• The spectrum of freight vendors in this engagement spanned form small owner-operator trucking company to large-cap railways. Each with their own invoice formats and idiosincratic way to present information for processing.
• In addition, some vendors would perform two different types for services, for example they may provide shipping services.
• Taken together with the high daily volumes, this required a robust solution capable of dealing with the ideosincratic nuances of this steel maker business processes

Engagement Model

• This customer was already utilizing Simplify'd IDP platform for processing regular AP invoices as a fully managed service.
• After a couple of sessions to define the message data schema fromt he ERP and the required matching logic, the Simplify'd team was ready to begin processing freight invoices within 24 hours.
• After a fast ramp-up to approximately 75% of the total volume, the Simplify'd team began tackling the remaining hihg-complexity invoices.
• We leveraged the IDP platform visual workflows builder to create custom workflows for rail invoices and for invoices from companies that provided also services like pickling, slitting, etc.

Results

• 100% of freight invoices are now being processed automatically
• 800+ pages processed per hour
• $100,000+ annual savings though prompt identification of billing errors
• Automatic matching of bill of lading and support documents to invoice