Geographically Dispersed Operations? There’s a Key to Total Visibility

For any large corporation with widespread national or international operations, visibility of your financial operations is essential to ensuring efficiency and effectiveness.

For the United States’ largest distributor of industrial and speciality chemicals, Univar, which turns over $10bn in revenue and ships hundreds of thousands of products via truck, rail and ship from each of its 700 North American distribution facilities, never was the issue of visibility more pressing than back in 2002.

The problem

Univar’s tedious paper-based invoicing and workflow system had created a disconnection between its national facilities which were suffering from extensive validation problems and a general lack of visibility throughout the organization. Despite numerous internal initiatives to meet this challenge, no significant advantages had ever been achieved. 

The solution

To dramatically reduce the complexity of routing paper documents across all 700 of its facilities, Univar employed Direct Commerce to implement its automated e-invoicing and workflow solution.

The result

Univar now process 100% of their invoices through the Direct Commerce Workflow engine. Not only are Univar suppliers able to gain more timely access to their invoice and payment status information, strengthening Univar supplier relationships, but Univar employees were granted enhanced accessibility to the invoicing system. This meant that regardless of time or location, Univar employees could easily process invoices – reviewing invoice status, payments, purchase orders and approvals regardless of source, and for those managing the system, invoice data was more easily available for detailed analysis.

Univar were able to dramatically improve visibility over their operations and bind together the common activities taking place across all 700 of its national distribution centres, as well as secure greater efficiency and cost savings– which are all preliminary requirements to support the future expansion of its operations.

Univar's full case study, complete with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ look at its e-invoicing and workflow processes is available for download via podcast or pdf.