ERP Systems Refinement

Middy's new ERP system allows for supplier purchase order and EDI invoice reconciliation to be centralised in the Accounts Payable team, where in the previous ERP system this process was performed by branch officers at over 100 store locations.

The new ERP system also introduced stricter validation rules than the previous system. While this resulted in more accurate reconciliation of supplier purchase orders and invoices, it also increased the amount of manual intervention required when compared with the previous system. The tasks previously performed by officers at the individual branches were now stretching the capacity of the Accounts Payable team.

Portable worked with Middy's Accounts Payable and IT teams to find ways to reduce the amount of manual verification required for supplier purchase order and invoice reconciliation. Some of the improvement opportunities identified were:

This was a massive Digital capability uplift for what has traditionally been a bricks and mortar business. The collective effort invested in change management throughout this initiative saw Middy’s teams excitedly embracing new tools and capability that built alignment across the company, and delighted customers.  

• Improving ‘best match’ of invoices to specific purchase order fulfilments where there are multiple deliveries, resulting in less time spent by the Accounts Payable team manually reassigning invoices to the correct purchase order fulfilment
• Creating tolerances, within an acceptable range, to accept price discrepancies between purchase orders and invoices
• Adding checks to differentiate between unit-of-measure differences and actual receipting differences where there is a cost discrepancy, e.g. If Middy’s purchases 100 units of product and the supplier invoices for 1 box of product (containing 100 units) this is a valid unit-of-measure difference, as opposed to Middy’s purchasing 10 units of product and the supplier invoicing for 11 units, which is a receipting difference
• Reducing automatic matching of multiple unique invoices to unique order fulfillments that appear identical (e.g. same products and quantities receipted)
• Improving product catalogue data integrity between Middy's system and their suppliers’

• Undertaking requirements gathering with the Accounts Payable team
• Whiteboarding solutions with the Middy's IT team
• Creating functional specification documents for Middy's ERP vendor
• User acceptance testing of changes delivered by Middy's ERP vendor
• Demonstrating changes for Accounts Payable team
• Validating changes post-deployment to live environment

With these improvements now live, Middy's Accounts Payable team have reported a 42% reduction in manual intervention for the supplier purchase order and invoice reconciliation process.

This result significantly frees up capacity for the Accounts Payable team to focus on actual processing exceptions and other high-value work.