Digital transformation of accounts payable function results in efficient bill payment and reduced penalties

Kofax, a leading supplier of software to automate and digitally transform information-intensive processes, announced a major telecommunications company significantly improved invoice processing productivity and reduced costs through its comprehensive implementation of Kofax software.

With more than 1,000 pieces of mail received by the organization’s accounts payable (AP) department daily, the AP team needed a solution that would streamline invoice processing. Kofax Capture, Kofax Transformation and Kofax Kapow work in tandem to expedite processing and payment of the company’s bills and reduce late payment penalties.

The Kofax solution enabled the telecom provider to move from paper to electronic billing and take advantage of online bill payment options offered by a number of government agencies and utilities companies.

The organization built dozens of Kapow robots that automatically retrieve approximately 9,000 invoices per month from 30 online portals, delivering the information to its finance systems for automatic processing and payment. The company estimates its Kofax deployment has digitized close to 95 percent of its AP operations and increased productivity by 400 percent.

Kapow, the #originalbot, is robotic process automation (RPA) software that automates and digitally transforms a wide range of human and information intensive processes across front- and back-office operations. It allows users to develop and deploy smart robots that mimic human actions while driving continuous improvement using AI and machine learning.

Kapow robots interact seamlessly across desktop software, traditional enterprise and browser-based systems, and websites, automating processes, aggregating data, transforming it into actionable information, triggering responses, and communicating with other applications.

The telecom provider is steadily expanding its web data extraction work, and ultimately plans to cover more than 100 vendor sites, using Kapow to retrieve more than 15,000 invoices every month. With the company’s Kapow usage escalating, full return on investment is expected within a year of the original implementation.

The provider further extended its digital transformation of the AP function by implementing Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation to automatically extract key information from vendor invoices and integrate the newly digitized content with its back-end finance systems.

Productivity rose by approximately 200 percent per person and half of the department’s full-time staff were reassigned to other areas within the organization. With the AP team processing invoices faster and more accurately, time-to-payment was shortened as well, reducing the risk of late penalties and disruption to services.