Explore how Nihilent helped an international casual dining restaurant chain automate invoice verification in South Africa, with a bot that runs around the clock, validates invoices in minutes and reconciles 70,000 of them a year.
Service
Intelligent Automation
Vertical
Energy
Region
Africa
Tech Stack
Robotic Process Automation, Unattended Bots With Custom Defined Triggers, Multiformat Invoice Processing
The client is an international casual dining restaurant chain with a large operation in South Africa. Validating supplier invoices depended on BPO centered operations that needed significant effort, and that effort was slowing vendor onboarding, stretching settlement times and weakening the business’s position in negotiations with its vendors.
Manual invoice verification was consuming effort and slowing down the relationships that keep restaurants supplied.
01
Tens of thousands of invoices a year were checked by hand through outsourced operations.
02
Invoices arrived from vendors in a range of different formats.
03
Verification delays extended the time it took to settle with vendors.
04
Bringing new vendors on board was a significant operational challenge.
05
Slow, manual processes limited the business’s ability to negotiate with vendors.
Nihilent digitized the invoice verification process in the finance function and deployed an intelligent automation bot to run it.
Process Analysis
Analyzed the finance process to identify where automation would create the most efficiency.
Multiformat Processing
Built the bot to read and validate invoices in a variety of formats.
Validation in Minutes
Automated checks validate each invoice within minutes of arrival.
Abnormality Flags
The bot flags abnormalities for people to review, rather than passing them through.
Around the Clock Operation
Unattended bots run 24x7 on custom defined triggers to reduce handling time.
invoices reconciled every year
unattended bot availability
to validate an invoice
average handling time
dependence on manual, outsourced validation
By putting invoice verification in the hands of a bot that never stops, Nihilent helped a restaurant chain settle with vendors faster and redirect its finance team to work that needs people.
