Vendor Invoice Automation
Our client’s employee benefits organization managed a $2 billion industry-leading HR benefits program for their company covering over 150,000 employees spanning numerous business units across the U.S. and internationally. They partnered with dozens of vendors to provide a broad range of services including medical insurance, financial and retirement programs, wellness services, legal assistance, courtesy services, discounts, and more. Their vendor invoice payment process was manual and inefficient; consuming nearly two thousand labor hours annually to intake, review, approve, and coordinate with Accounts Payable to process payments.
The Benefits team used a cloud-based workflow management product called Kissflow for vendors to upload their invoices via a secure web form; however, it was designed as a self-contained product and could not easily integrate with other applications or databases. The Accounts Payable team used Oracle R12 and there was no turnkey solution to integrate the two systems. Additionally, they were constrained with limited budgets and technical resources to implement and maintain a bespoke solution.
Dolente Consulting was challenged to design and implement a secure, scalable solution within budget and resource constraints. Additionally, our client needed improved analytics of their invoices. We started by conducting market research to seek products that provided low-code endpoints between Kissflow and other applications. Concurrently we investigated integration options for Oracle.
Our client’s IT organization provided SFTP file transfers which collected and loaded vendor invoices into Oracle for other teams. We found a product, called Zapier which provided connectors between several products including Kissflow. For analytics, other client organizations utilized Tableau for BI visualizations and reports. With these products and integration options, we designed and implemented a solution to automate the vendor invoice payment process utilizing Zapier, Pentaho Data Integration, and a data warehouse.
We implemented Zapier to integrate Kissflow with a SQL Server data warehouse we built to house invoice data along with the benefit organization’s financial and budgeting data. Utilizing Pentaho, we built an ETL job to run daily and incrementally extract invoices from the data warehouse, transform the data to a CSV file, then load the file to an SFTP location. We coordinated with the IT organization to pick up the file, load it to Oracle R12, and send success/failure notifications.
Successful delivery of this solution eliminated 1200 manual labor hours annually.