Thomson Reuters Unifies and Dramatically Accelerates Worldwide Accounts-Payable Processing with Kofax MarkView
Highlights
- Achieved a 45% reduction in vendor invoice recording cycle times.
- Slashed invoice ready-to-pay process times by 40%.
- Reduced helpdesk costs through self-service vendor access to invoice status.
- Improved cash management through flexibility of MarkView workflow to accommodate invoice processing exceptions.
- Leveraging new business intelligence on liability of unapproved or unprocessed invoices.
- Easily integrating newly acquired businesses into workflow processes within 60 days.
Situation
Intelligent information is a driving force in the enterprise today, and no company exemplifies this more clearly than Thomson Reuters. In 2008, the Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters Group and formed Thomson Reuters, bringing Thomson’s financial information business together with Reuters’ global news and financial data services leadership.
The acquisition transformed the company into a global enterprise with operations in 93 countries on 6 continents and more than 50,000 employees. Successfully integrating the business technologies used by these regional business centers was a significant challenge.
Challenge
As part of the technology integration, the Shared Services Group within Thomson Reuters wanted to address the added diversity and scale of accounts payable operations outside of North America with the objective of streamlining worldwide operations for the highest possible levels of efficiency and service.
The Shared Services Group evaluated enterprise accounts payable solutions that could be integrated with their SAP customer relationship management (CRM) and SalesForce.com systems. Key considerations in selecting a solution included its abilities to:
- Streamline and standardize approval workflows across regions and cost centers,
- Integrate the group’s cost savings and storage resource management (SRM) models,
- Provide ease of use for both non-financial employees and new employees on an ongoing basis,
- Capture invoices and deliver swift visibility of their progress throughout the system,
- Automatically flag and redirect invoice processing exceptions into an alternate workflow that could be approved by lower level team members,
- Incorporate workflow hierarchy tables and other highly complex macro information maintained in SAP, and
- Readily support additional changes resulting from additional acquisitions or divestments.
Prior to the acquisition, Reuters had used Kofax MarkView with Oracle for its accounts payable processing, and MarkView was one of three solutions considered by the Shared Services Group.
Solution
Rajan Verma, Vice President of the General Accounting Centre at Thomson Reuters, explained, “MarkView was a step ahead of the others from the beginning, given that it had a good track record with Reuters for the prior four years. Another important factor for us was the need for a single, consistent, one touch solution that we could apply throughout the business process. MarkView stood out as a system which doesn’t require a user to have a financial background in order to work effectively. This was especially important because 80% of our 55,000 employees touch the MarkView system in some way in their roles as domain experts, and most of them come from a non-financial background.”
A major advantage of MarkView over other systems on the market was its flexible workflow, which allowed the Shared Services Group to create an alternate workflow for invoice exceptions. This allows review by even less senior financial analysts to determine whether certain payments—involving millions of dollars of payables related to international taxes and real estate rentals—are appropriately valued or can potentially be lowered. “The system was flexible enough to identify these types of expenses, highlight them and automatically route them to a different workflow,” Verma noted. “This was a key advantage of MarkView for Thomson Reuters.”
The Thomson Reuters Shared Services Group began a two phase implementation, with the first phase involving the MarkView implementation and its integration with SAP, and the second focusing on rolling out SAP to the Reuters organization. Dividing the now global operation into three major sections, Verma’s team staggered the rollout, with one section going live in August 2008, a second in October 2008, and the third and final section fully implemented in January 2009.
By April 2009, the Shared Services Group had made process changes to support the new invoice processing system, including changes to the locations where invoices should be sent and the method for entering invoices into the systems. The evolution of these business processes, in turn, triggered the need for some modifications to the system. The group made those adjustments, completing the implementation of processes and systems in about nine months.
Results
Verma’s team soon discovered that their streamlining efforts were reducing overall invoice turnaround time significantly. “In July 2008, on average it took us about 18 days to enter an invoice, have it date-printed by vendor, and then deliver it into the process,” Verma said. “In November 2010 we were able to reduce that timeframe by 45%, and we’re now consistent on that timeframe across the globe.”
In addition, the Shared Services Group has improved its service levels by achieving a 40% reduction in time spent moving invoices to the state where they are ready for payment. Verma reported, “In November 2008, the time required to finalize an invoice for payment was five days. Since our implementation of MarkView and our standardized processes, we’re down to four days as of November 2010, which is close to a savings of six days in the overall process. That means a lot to vendors in terms of timeline.”
Thomson Reuters is also finding business value in MarkView’s reporting capabilities. “From a Shared Services perspective,” Verma said, “I can now review workload across different individuals and teams, see how productive an individual is with processing, where I need to deploy processes and which businesses or regions are taking longer than others.”
The financial intelligence delivered by the MarkView system has proven invaluable. Verma explained, “Now we can slice and cut information into various parts to see where the liability is on invoices that are lying unprocessed or unapproved. While SAP or any other enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can give us visibility into the data entered into SAP, only MarkView helps us leverage the information that has not yet reached that stage, which can be significant.”
The company’s vendors are also benefitting through new self-service access to information on the status of their invoices, which has reduced help desk costs.
New acquisitions are part of Thomson Reuters’ plans for growth. Verma noted, “From an administration standpoint, MarkView makes it so easy to integrate any new business into our workflow process. It’s plug-and-play for us now for any acquisition of a decent size, and it’s seamless for vendors. Being able to do this on a 60 day timeline represents a significant cost and time savings for our group.” As Thomson Reuters continues to expand its operations around the globe, the Shared Services Group is assured that its current invoice processing system and processes can readily support new acquisitions.
