Norco Reduces Invoice Processing Labor Requirements by 50%

Accounts Payable AutomationDocument ProcessingFood and Beverage

Norco dairy cooperative has served Australia’s dairy farmers and consumers for over 120 years. To streamline the processing of its invoices, Norco partnered with Storata, a specialist in digital transformation of business systems and processes. They implemented ABBYY intelligent document processing (IDP) to automate invoice processing and shift 50 percent of staff time from data entry to vendor engagement.

Key takeaways

Up to 80 percent

labor savings

Sandra Hollands

General Manager - ICT

Cutting data entry labor in half has significant value for the members of Norco’s farmer-owned dairy co-operative. All Norco profits go back to the dairy farmers and the communities in which they live.

Challenge

Norco was processing up to 300,000 invoices manually across two ERP systems each year. Invoices associated with a PO would be emailed to individual stores and head offices, summarizing goods shipped to different locations. After data entry, each location needed to send email approval to confirm goods have been received prior to vendor payment. Norco was looking for an automated solution that met their requirements for:

Automating PO and non-PO invoice processing
Significantly reducing manual data entry
An easy-to-use and cost-effective solution
Integration with their ERPs and other systems
Flexibility to process documents beyond invoices

Solution

Norco found that ABBYY IDP could process their PO-based and non-PO invoices so fast and smart, it reduced their labor by 50 percent. Staff is now free to improve vendor management.

Business rules in ABBYY IDP have streamlined Norco’s entire invoicing process, end to end.

They now have a complete audit trail of the information flowing between systems.

The flexibility of ABBYY IDP makes it easy to use to streamline additional back-end processes.

Value

Labor savings of up to 80 percent.
Staff freed from repetitive data entry to engage more closely with vendors and validation.
ABBYY IDP makes information actionable for use with document workflow systems and ERPs.
Timely and accurate vendor payments.