Wednesday 27th June, 2012

Irish electricity company ESB (Electricity Supply Board) has implemented cloud-based offerings from Ariba, aimed at transforming its purchase order and invoice management processes and streamlining them into an automated way to reduce errors, speed approvals and drive savings.

“Purchase Order and invoice management is a highly time and cost-intensive function,” said Shana Dillon, Manager, Finance Operations at ESB. “With Ariba’s solutions, we can create an effective process for interacting with our suppliers across the payment cycle that will lead to greater efficiencies and savings,” she added.

ESB is relying on Ariba® Invoice Management™ and PO Automation™ to  make these changes happen. Delivered on-demand via the Ariba Network, the solutions provide the kind of technology which ESB expects to achieve:

• A completely paperless invoice process in 100 days
• Reduced operating costs by 70 percent or more
• Eliminated exceptions and simplify and accelerate dispute resolution
• Minimised risk of overpayments, duplicate payments and fraudulent payments
• Compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements
• Effective benchmarking and measured performance

“Accounts Payable teams spend inordinate amounts of time and effort processing paper invoices – from matching them with contracts and tracking POs and goods receipt to correcting errors and fielding supplier inquiries. Yet most companies still have limited visibility into the process, leaving them exposed to risks like overlooked billing discrepancies, missed discounts, and overpayments,”

said James Tucker, Director of Marketing, Invoice and Payment Solutions, Ariba.