Background
Middy's is Australia's largest independent wholesaler of electrical products. Middy's IT team is currently undertaking a number of technology transformation projects, including migrating from an in-house built and hosted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to a third-party cloud-hosted solution.
As part of the ERP migration project, Portable was engaged to uplift Middy's Electronic Data Interface (EDI) capabilities, increasing automation of processes between Middy's and their trading partners.
The challenge
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.
The implementation
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’
Portable facilitated the end-to-end delivery of these improvements by:
- 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
Results and benefits
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.
Testimonial
"As the CIO of Middy’s Electrical, overseeing our digital transformation has been a pivotal journey, underscored by our collaboration with [Portable].
The engagement with [Portable] was more than a vendor-client relationship; it was a partnership that extended our capabilities and thought leadership in the digital domain. Together we have delivered a seamless, efficient, and engaging online experience for our customers.
Their role in our journey has been invaluable, and I highly recommend their expertise to any organisation looking to navigate the complexities of digital transformation with a reliable, forward-thinking partner."
Darren Edgerton, CIO, Middy's Electrical
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