AP Invoice Automation
Prologis is the world’s largest owner, manager, and developer of distribution facilities, with 542.3 million square feet (50.4 million square meters) of industrial space in 132 markets across North America, Asia, and Europe. Prologis leases industrial space to manufacturers, retailers, transportation companies, third-party logistics providers, and other enterprises with large-scale distribution needs. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Prologis is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500.
Prologis engaged Elire to successfully implement their Canon Accounts Payable Invoicing Automation solution. The primary goals of this project were to ensure the solution could intake, scan, and extract invoice data while minimizing potential data entry errors, reducing reliance on paper, improve traceability for end-to-end invoice processes, and integrate with the Prologis ERP for voucher creation.
Additionally, Elire aimed to identify opportunities for process improvement that supported the Canon AP automation solution. The goal was to find areas in which to improve the user experience. The team found that improvements could be made to design reporting, dashboards, and notifications that would benefit the Accounts Payable team, business approvers, and add to the company’s underlying strategic goals. Our team worked to develop and communicate change by providing robust training and performance support to the Prologis AP community.
Elire accomplished this by delivering project management of the accounts payable invoice automation solution by analyzing the Prologis current state and disconnects, designing the future state system and processes, analyzing the future state impact, mapping the final state process processes and system, developing and executing a comprehensive testing strategy, and developing training materials for invoice approvers and key stakeholders.
The challenge that both the Canon and Elire team faced was the fact that this implementation was taking place on a global scale. This presented unique challenges to each region of global business. Elire and Canon worked to meet this challenge by collaborating with the Prologis International Teams. This often times included meetings at all hours of the day, including many 2:00 AM – 4:00 AM meetings to interact with both the Asia and EU regions during their business hours.
The other large roadblock of the project was an unforeseen security requirement. A few days before go-live, the team learned that the system architecture would not meet Prologis security requirements. The overall architecture was reviewed in detail at the beginning of the project, but unfortunately a key personnel change created a stronger security requirement prior to go-live. To quickly overcome this issue, Elire worked with members of both Canon and Prologis over the course of a few very long days to make sure an adjustment could be made for a successful go-live.
The Elire team worked closely with our partner Canon to successfully deploy a global business solution for AP processing automation for Prologis. The keys to success through this project were having a well-defined project plan, executing according to plan, and most importantly, developing and maintaining a close and productive working relationship with the Prologis team. This relationship was strengthened when all regions were brought together for an initial series of meetings to gain alignment.
These three items were necessary for collaboratively creating a future state business design, building the future state system design, as well as successfully launching and supporting the go-live solution by breaking the rollout into phases by global region and flying to those regions to meet with stakeholders and coordinate with them.
With go-live of the solution, we were able to provide a solution to each of the disconnects that were called out during their Phase 1 Current State Review, as well as successfully meet each of the project goals. Over 30% of disconnects were associated with system issues which include invoice intake, payment terms, faulty supplier data, etc. Another 20% of disconnects that we were able to solve related to the reduction of manual work. This manual work included the manual coding of invoices, updating supplier information, and attaching invoice images to the corresponding voucher. Go-live was successfully completed on 07/01/2019. Read Phase 2 Accounts Payables Automation Global Implementation.
Interested in learning more about how Elire Advisory Services can assist your team? Visit our Advisory Services Page or contact our team at [email protected].
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