Welcome to Dolphin

Customer Success Stories

Best Practices Accounts Payable Automation and Workflow

The Company
One of the largest multi-media and on-line retailers in the world with television, retail stores and outlets as well as the Internet as their marketplace.

The Problem
The Company has three regions and handles huge volumes of incoming invoices. Primarily paper driven, the time to process was long and labor intensive. The staff was spending too much time handling exceptions causing lost invoices, duplicate payments, and other inefficiencies. The decision was made to automate as much of the process as possible and to start with the UK region.

Technical challenges included using the SAP Apparel and Footwear (AFS) module and wanting to auto-post; workflow had to be within SAP; the project was in the UK, but the technical team was in the US; not all approvers were SAP users and there was no budget for additional licenses.

The Solution - Automated Invoice Processing and SAP Workflow
Leveraging the company's SAP environment, Dolphin implemented our best practices solution for Accounts Payable (AP). The Company is using our Invoice InfoCenter dashboard for invoice status at-a-glance, Dolphin process tracking throughout the invoice-to-pay process, SAP Workflow, and invoice header/line Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Our web-based approval module is being used for both SAP and non-SAP approvals.

Manual processes were replaced with automated ones reducing risk by eliminating errors, duplicate payments, and lost and/or misplaced documents. The Company transitioned from a completely paper-driven, manually intensive AP vendor payment process to an automated, streamlined and flexible workflow solution thereby reducing costs and improving inefficiencies.

The Results

•	Reduced average invoice processing time from 20 days to 9 days
•	40% reduction in processing staff
•	Improved productivity through all processing steps
•	Eliminated errors and redundancies
•	Invoices are handled only once
•	Simplified approval process
•	Decreased number of vendor inquiries
•	Provides complete visibility, control and audit trails from point of entry into SAP to payment

Other Solutions
The Company also implemented SAP's Data Archive Retention Tool (DART) for the UK and Germany, and data archiving in the US, for FI and MM. Ongoing data archiving is ensuring optimal system performance and compliance for structured and non-structured data and documents.