Chris Davis-Pipe,
Group Vice-President,
IT Crown Worldwide
Global Shared Service Center Stops Moving Paper and Makes Worldwide Savings
With distributed, local accounting departments spread across 50 countries, Crown Worldwide recognized the potential to gain significant benefits by centralizing and automating its Purchase to Pay operations. Crown also wanted to establish more consistent, compliant, and transparent financial processes to address problems such as duplicate or late payments, lost invoices and a lack of financial visibility.
Key Challenges
- Inconsistent standards and accounting processes across the group
- Multiple financial and cost allocation databases
- Manual paperwork hindering productivity
- Duplicate and late invoice payments
The solution: Basware Invoice Processing & Purchase Management
Basware Invoice Processing and Basware Purchase Management were implemented by Basware's Australian partner TAG Services. The Shared Service Center in Kuala Lumpur now processes invoices originating from Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom. The Basware solutions will be rolled out to offices in more than 40 countries.
Invoices are received and scanned locally in each country. Staff in the Kuala Lumpur Shared Service center then register them into Basware Invoice Processing. Basware Order Matching automatically matches incoming invoices with pre-approved purchase orders or cost estimates and no further approval workflow is needed. Non-matching invoices, and any not related to purchase orders are sent through the electronic workflow for coding and approving by country managers, before they are electronically posted to the appropriate AP system. Once all the relevant information is in the Basware system, it is available for all other accounting processes.
Key Benefits
- Productivity improvements and cost savings
- Enterprise-wide financial visibility and accrual reporting
- Easy access to archived invoices
- Streamlined, consistent processes across the group
- Ability to pay suppliers on time, avoiding late payment charges