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Purchase-to-pay

Major online retail shop operating in Eastern Europe​
Introduction
The fast-growing online retail shop was struggling to improve the 3 Way Match Ratio on their vendor side. Too many discrepancies in the price on the purchase order, invoice and goods receipt documents made it impossible to match different currencies. As a result, extra effort is required from the organisation due to additional documents and payments that needed to be processed. Process mining was the perfect way to identify root causes of these mismatches and ultimately improve the 3 Way Match Ratio. 
Challenge
  • Lack of transparency in Purchase-to-Pay process (performance) due to data being dispersed over 2 different IT systems (SAP and custom ERP) made it impossible to identify the root causes of the poor 3 Way Match performance. (the performance issues)
  • Numerous discrepancies in the price on the three documents caused a low 3 Way Match Ratio which led to much additional effort.
Solution
  • DataLane realized process transparency by connecting the 2 different IT systems and visualizing the different process steps.
    • Automation initiatives:
    • Preventing manual runs of SAP transactions to improve the process accuracy.
  • Automating the creation of the invoices of the biggest vendors by using an EDI/OCR system.
  • Process transparency made it possible to identify the root causes of the 3 Way Match issues. 
  • An automatic trigger was set up to notify the vendor when there is a price change and the vendor could update the documents accordingly. 
  • The solution offered a monitoring dashboard to track important process KPIs over time. 
Value Created
  • The major bottlenecks in the Purchase-to-Pay process were identified by process mining analysis and subsequently eliminated by automation initiatives.
  • DataLane identified the root causes affecting the 3 Way Match Ratio which made improvement opportunities possible. The solution proved to be successful in tracking and preventing 3 Way Match issues which has an estimated saving potential of 100,000 euros per year.