Vendor Payments
Client portfolio
Our client is one of the largest liquor manufacturing companies in the United States of America, with a perfect blend of rich ancestral heritage and modern innovative flavor, working strenuously at finding the right balance between staying ahead of customers’ expectations and delivering quality experiences.
Overview – Origins
The vendor payments process involves the disbursement of funds to suppliers or vendors in exchange for goods or services. It is a crucial component of Procure-to-Pay (PTP) process, ensuring that vendors are paid accurately and on time. PTP teams must overcome the challenges and meet payment timelines, with a focus on accuracy and validation, audit, and reporting. In our client’s scenario, there are various teams involved in processing each stage of the payment request following all regulations and compliance factors set.
Problem statement – The Past
There are three key challenges to be addressed: Trust, Timeliness and Transparency. Trust in the sense of accuracy of the information provided and avoiding duplicate payments. Timeliness, paying vendor on time as per agreed payment terms and handle adhoc urgent payments on priority. Transparency on the overall process, teams involved and mainly on the life cycle of a payment request (Invoice to Payment).
Our Solution – The Present
A tailored solution powered by automation from Tulip was designed and developed addressing all the three components, 3Ts.
Using Tulip’s SAP agent, request details are first validated at inputs and then with SAP to handle the accuracy of the request details, the first T, Trust. Here the vendor information is validated with SAP data, requests details are verified with older invoice documents in SAP to avoid any duplicates. Approvals are kept in place with automated delegations as per Invoice amounts for further review and confirmation, providing all data for the finance controllers in the Tulip Task itself, addressing second T, Transparency.
Using Tulip workflow studio, the whole business process is categorized into Invoice and Payment modules. The process was streamlined to reach various teams with predefined rules, ensuring all checks are completed and required data is made available to approvers. The SAP agent helps interacts with SAP concurrently and in backend and makes the request processing faster, addressing the final T, Timeliness.
The lifecycle of a request can be viewed with status and with whom it is pending with action at each step giving transparency to the process controllers.
Value delivered – The Outcome
Potential extended scope – The Future
The overall solution is modularized to Invoice and Payments, thus making it reusable and applying it to PTP processes as needed.
