Global Real Estate Firm’s AP Automation

The Client

This real estate firm is one of the largest, privately-held investors, developers, and managers in the world. With over 60 years of experience, they have over $144 billion assets under management located across 25 countries. The firm wanted to automate AP invoices through robotic process automation (RPA).

CLIENT PROFILE
EMPLOYEES: 4,800+
INDUSTRY: Real Estate / Property Management
HEADQUARTERS: Texas
FOUNDED: 1957
 

The Project Scope

The client’s focus for this initial phase was their IT Accounts Payable Invoices. The process is manual, repetitive, and very time-consuming. It’s typically done bi-weekly for more than 15 vendors, averaging 1,200 invoices, and 600 hours per year to process the invoices.

The client had three main challenges when performing the manual invoice capture:

  • Their current Accounts Payable software only allows manual typing of the invoice data, making it repetitive.

  • They receive invoices on different days for each vendor, so they have to consolidate them to avoid processing them one by one. This delays the payment process.

  • The manual capturing is prone to significant human error.

Smartbridge has extensive experience in financial automation.

The Smartbridge Solution

The client and Smartbridge consultants evaluated various solution options and looked at RPA technology to automate the AP invoice capture and ingestion process.

RPA software from UiPath was used to automatically extract the data from the incoming invoices and push it into their AP platform, making use of the newest technology available for OCR, Machine Learning and AI.

This avoided human errors, including entries, dates, total amounts, and formatting the invoice properly by reading the line descriptions of the invoice to identify the business unit and cost center for each vendor accordingly.

The solution focused on automating the following AP Invoicing Processes for IT related invoices:

  • Download the invoices from the records repository (Box.com)

  • Extract the data from the invoices and identify the vendor, total amounts and billing dates.

  • Push the invoices extracted and formatted data into the AP platform (NEXUS) for posting and approval.

Invoices now automatically go to the AP automation software with no human intervention.  We automated the invoice data transcript and posting into AP Platform using UiPath Document Understanding with Machine Learning and AI, and Action Center for manual exception processing.

The technologies utilized for automating AP invoices:

rpa ui path automation invoices
rpa nexus
rpa box.com

AP Automation: Success By the Numbers

1

bot
deployed

1,200

invoices
processed annually

540+

hours
saved annually

90%

improvement
over manual invoice processing time

With the successful automation of IT invoice processing, the client intends to expand the rollout to other departments in the company.

UiPath, with its underlying special capabilities such as Document Understanding, Machine Learning and AI is very powerful, and can be used to automate any processes a company may have – simple or complex.

AP Automation is one of the many high impact use cases every company can boldly automate. It is a proven concept and solution.

Real Estate Firm’s AP Automation in Action

Keep Reading & Watch: this CIO’s RPA Implementation Interview & Best Practices

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