North American Mining Company

North America's largest iron ore pellet producer viewed accounts payable (AP) operations as a standard cost of doing business. With a paper-based, decentralized operation, the mining and natural resources company had little visibility into invoice processing.

Relying on manual processes for nearly 360,000 invoices annually resulted in slow and labor-intensive AP operations, which led the organization to investigate how automation could transform its AP processes. North American Mining Company found the perfect solution in Hyland OnBase™.

Process highlights

• Staff created templates for each vendor, allowing OnBase to extract and upload invoice data automatically.

• Before OnBase, each site processed its own invoices. Now, each site routes all invoices to the company's headquarters in Ohio, eliminating duplicate effort and increasing efficiency.

• OnBase identifies and assigns a value to each type of invoice to ensure all early payment discounts are recognized.

Impact

• Significant savings: With improved visibility, the organization is able to identify and leverage early-payment discounts, resulting in annual savings of $5 million.

• Eliminated manual data entry: Invoice information is automatically extracted and updated, eliminating the need for manual data entry and minimizing human error.

• Increased capacity: The AP department is able to process a higher volume of invoices with fewer resources, allowing nearly 50% of the staff to be relocated to higher-value, business-critical assignments.