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Schott logoSCHOTT

Material technology company facilitates growth with 99 percent faster invoice processing from OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP® Solutions

Schott logo

About SCHOTT

SCHOTT has more than 140 years of experience in re-inventing glass and other advanced materials, pushing technological boundaries to make life better. With material expertise and unique processing know-how, SCHOTT supports a wide range of industries.
A person holding a glass
  • Headquarters:
    Mainz, Germany
  • Employees:
    17,100
  • Annual revenues:
    €2.9 billion

Summary

Challenges

  • Process a growing number of invoices each year without increasing accounts payable headcount.
  • Free accounts payable teams to spend less time on repetitive data entry and focus on value-added work.

Solution

  • Selected an automated, integrated vendor invoice management solution.
  • Streamlined the purchase-to-pay process.
  • Expanded the solution to support the global business.

Results

  • Accelerated invoice processing by 99%
  • Processed 3x more invoices
  • Achieved an STP rate of >5% for supplier invoices

Challenges

  • Invoice volumes growing significantly year on year
  • Manual accounts payable processes reduced operational efficiency
  • Limited time available for accounts payable teams to focus on value-added work

Founded as a small glassworks in Germany, SCHOTT has risen to become one of the world’s leading specialty glass and material technology companies. With more than 17,000 highly skilled employees working in over 30 countries, the company produces high-quality components and advanced materials, including specialty glass, glass-ceramics, and polymers for a wide range of industrial sectors.

Through its commitment to research and development innovation, manufacturing excellence, and responsive customer service, SCHOTT is growing rapidly. To maintain smooth back-office operations during a period of significant expansion, the company aimed to ensure that its accounts payable (AP) teams could process higher volumes of supplier invoices in a timely manner.

Claudia Grosch, process manager financial applications at SCHOTT, said, “As a business, we are constantly exploring new ways to make a difference. This commitment extends to internal workflows such as AP, which are a key enabler of the financial shared services we provide to internal customers.”

In the past, SCHOTT relied heavily on paper-based AP processes. At the company’s shared service centers, AP professionals would manually re-key data from paper invoices into the company’s SAP system.

Hans-Peter Brückmann, head of the financial shared service center Mitterteich at SCHOTT, added, “Because of the rate of business growth at SCHOTT, we needed to accommodate year-on-year increases to our invoice volumes. To keep our AP operations lean and efficient, we were keen to find a way to handle this growth by insourcing to reduce our dependency on external service providers.”

To solve the challenge, SCHOTT aimed to streamline its purchase-to-pay workflow, replacing manual process steps with automation. The ultimate objective was to achieve straight-through processing (STP) for as many invoices as possible—freeing its existing team of AP professionals to focus on value-added work.

A person inspecting a glass sheet

OpenText solutions give us a clean, structured workflow that facilitates smoother communication between our purchasing and accounting teams.

Claudia Grosch
Process Manager Financial Applications, SCHOTT

Solution

SCHOTT augmented its shared service centers with OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions. Fully integrated with SAP S/4HANA®, the solution enables the company to build powerful automated workflows to streamline AP processes.

Products deployed

Services provided

  • OpenText™ Professional Services

    Achieve business objectives and maximize ROI with a people-centric approach that offers personalized strategic advice, support, and solutions

Selecting an automated, integrated vendor invoice management solution

For SCHOTT, OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions offered a highly effective and reliable way to process invoices at speed and scale. Tightly integrated with SAP, the solution automates processing from receipt to posting.

“Initially, we were looking for a solution to support our business in Germany,” explained Grosch. “We greatly appreciated that Vendor Invoice Management could be easily configured to support the tax and regulatory compliance frameworks of the many countries we operate in.”

Brückmann added, “We had already been using OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions for several years prior to our AP project, and our positive experiences with OpenText solutions and support in the past gave us the confidence that Vendor Invoice Management would be a good fit for SCHOTT.”

Streamlining the purchase-to-pay process

Working closely with OpenText, SCHOTT deployed and configured the OpenText solution to support its purchase-to-pay process: bringing greater speed, transparency, and control to AP activities at its shared service center.

Seeing positive impacts in SCHOTT’s German business, they chose to implement VIM across 20 additional countries to help process invoices more efficiency.

Grosch commented, “At the same time as scaling out the Vendor Invoice Management solution, we saw an opportunity to gain more control, save costs, and boost our recognition rate for data capture by deploying OpenText Capture for SAP Solutions.”

Expanding to support the global business

SCHOTT engaged experts from OpenText Professional Services to help support the global expansion of OpenText Vendor Invoice Management and the implementation of OpenText Capture for SAP Solutions. As SCHOTT made the transition to the next-generation ERP SAP S/4HANA, the company leveraged technical expertise from OpenText to help validate its automated AP workflows on the new platform.

“It was very reassuring to work with such experienced OpenText consultants,” said Brückmann. “OpenText Professional Services knew Vendor Invoice Management and Capture inside and out, which gave us the peace of mind that we were in safe hands.”

In partnership with OpenText Professional Services, SCHOTT has expanded and enhanced its AP automation capabilities, which now cover over 40 SAP company codes. Throughout the implementation, OpenText worked closely with the company’s IT and business project members to adapt the workflows to meet local and global requirements.

Grosch commented, “Working with OpenText makes us part of a global user community. We regularly attend OpenText events and industry roundtables, which give us the opportunity to share learnings with our peers at similar organizations and provide direct feedback to the OpenText product team.”

A Glass manufacturing worker

Our work with OpenText has helped us increase operational efficiency in our shared services centers and prepare SCHOTT for continued growth.

Hans-Peter Brückmann
Head of the Financial Shared Service Center Mitterteich, SCHOTT

Results

Since it started its AP automation journey with OpenText, SCHOTT has tripled the volume of invoices it processes while keeping headcount in its shared service centers lean.

Accelerated invoice processing by 99%

With OpenText Vendor Invoice Management and OpenText Capture powering its shared service centers, SCHOTT can process greater volumes of invoices faster than ever. Approximately 85 percent of suppliers now share their invoices in the form of PDF documents, which are captured and processed using intelligent automation from the OpenText solutions.

“In the past, the typical time from receiving to posting an invoice was around five days—now, it’s just five minutes,” explained Brückmann. “At the end of the procure-to-pay process, we store a copy of the invoice data in OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions. Having all our records in a central, secure platform makes audit and compliance tasks very straightforward.”

Processed 3x more invoices

At the start of its engagement, SCHOTT used OpenText Vendor Invoice Management to process invoices at its shared service center in Germany. Since then, the company has rolled out the solution globally, and now processes over half a million invoices a year.

“OpenText solutions give us a clean, structured workflow that facilitates smoother communication between our purchasing and accounting teams,” said Grosch. “Our AP users love the single-click entry feature. And for managers, built-in tracking and analytics makes it easier to ensure that we are meeting our service-level agreements with the business.”

Achieved an STP rate of >5% for supplier invoices

SCHOTT has already achieved an STP rate of more than 5 percent for AP, reducing workload for its shared service center and freeing employees to focus on value-added activities.

“We’re aiming to boost our STP rate in the years ahead,” confirmed Brückmann. “As more of our global suppliers shift to machine readable e-invoices, we’ll be able to make the process even easier and faster for all stakeholders.”

Looking ahead, SCHOTT is exploring opportunities to expand the use of OpenText Vendor Invoice Management beyond finance, helping to manage customer orders and order confirmations. “Our work with OpenText has helped us increase operational efficiency in our shared services centers and prepare SCHOTT for continued growth,” concluded Brückmann.

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