North America's largest iron ore pellet producer viewed accounts payable (AP) operations as a standard cost of doing business. With a paper-based, decentralized operation, the mining and natural resources company had little visibility into invoice processing.
Relying on manual processes for nearly 360,000 invoices annually resulted in slow and labor-intensive AP operations, which lead the organization to investigate how automation could transform its AP processes. North American Mining Company found the perfect solution in Hyland's OnBase.
Process highlights
Staff create templates for each vendor, allowing OnBase to extract and upload invoice data automatically.
Before OnBase, each site processed its own invoices. Now, each site routes all invoices to the company's headquarters in Ohio, eliminating duplicate effort and increasing efficiency.
OnBase identifies and assigns a value to each type of invoice to ensure all early payment discounts are recognized.
Impact
Significant savings: With improved visibility, the organization is able to identify and leverage early-payment discounts, resulting in annual savings of $5 million.
Eliminated manual data entry: Invoice information is automatically extracted and updated, eliminating the need for manual data entry and minimizing human error.
Increased capacity: The AP department is able to process a higher volume of invoices with fewer resources, allowing nearly 50% of the staff to be relocated to higher-value, business-critical assignments.