Rexel Canada accelerates invoice automation with Hyland IDP™

Industry: Electrical distribution/wholesale
Hyland solutions: Hyland IDP™, Hyland OnBase™
Partner: Onit

As invoice volumes grew across its supplier network, Rexel Canada sought a more scalable approach to nontrade invoice processing. By implementing Hyland IDP and integrating it with existing Hyland OnBase™ workflows, the company achieved a nearly 98% touchless invoice processing rate and reduced invoices requiring manual validation from approximately 40%–60% to 1%–2%. These gains accelerated processing while improving visibility and creating greater capacity for higher-value work.

As one of Canada's largest electrical distributors, Rexel Canada serves customers through more than 200 locations nationwide. Supporting that scale requires efficient processes that can grow alongside the business.

For Frederic Petit, CIO and vice president of supply chain, improving productivity and efficiency across back-office operations was a key priority. “We needed to be more productive and more efficient. We saw the opportunity to be more efficient with our back-office operations."

At the operational level, Sameera Rahman-Khan, accounts payable supervisor for the nontrade division, was focused on reducing invoice processing time, strengthening controls and advancing digital transformation initiatives.

“Too much of our team's time was spent on image cleanup and data rekeying instead of exception resolution and supplier support,” said Rahman-Khan.

Together, their priorities reflected a broader effort to modernize business processes and improve experiences for employees, suppliers and stakeholders across the organization.

Before implementing Hyland IDP, invoice processing required significant manual effort. Poor-quality scans, handwritten invoices and inconsistent supplier formats often led to extraction errors, forcing employees to correct and validate information manually. Many invoices required duplicate reviews, first within OCR systems and then again within downstream workflows, increasing processing time and limiting capacity for more strategic work.

Paper-based approvals and email-driven routing created additional inefficiencies. Teams often lacked visibility into where an invoice was within the approval process, making follow-up difficult and slowing response times. Manual processes also made reporting more challenging and increased the likelihood of misplaced documents or delayed approvals.

For Petit, one of the biggest limitations was traditional OCR technology. "We had a tool that was doing OCR in the traditional way, but you had to train the tool and if anything was deviating from the template, then you'd have to have a human intervene,” said Petit. "That was a loss of time, a lot of touches on a process that should be seamless.”

That training requirement also made variations within invoice data more difficult to accommodate. Onit described how differences such as French and English date formats could require additional configuration in the previous approach to normalize information for downstream processing. With Hyland IDP, the team can use instructions to account for these variations, reducing reliance on template-specific training and configuration. The previous process also required considerable hands-on validation. According to Onit, five employees were involved in validating invoice information, with manual validation required approximately 40% to 60% of the time. After Hyland IDP was implemented, the percentage requiring intervention dropped to approximately 1% to 2% during the first months, reducing the validation workload from five people to one.

As invoice volumes continued to grow, maintaining efficiency through manual intervention alone was no longer sustainable.

To modernize invoice processing, Rexel Canada implemented Hyland Content Innovation Cloud™, hosted on AWS, with Hyland IDP integrated into existing OnBase workflows. This hybrid approach combined AI-driven invoice processing with established OnBase workflows, preserving the governance, auditability and document management capabilities the organization relied on.

The solution streamlines invoice processing from ingestion through validation, approval and payment within a connected digital workflow. Using AI-driven document understanding, Hyland IDP can process invoices that traditionally required manual intervention, helping reduce exceptions and improve efficiency. Once IDP completes its processing, invoice information moves into the established OnBase workflows for downstream activities.

The implementation also built on Rexel Canada's established relationship with Onit. The partner has supported Rexel Canada as both a systems integrator and support team, developing an understanding of the organization's processes and business. Petit said the relationship brought value beyond product configuration. "They've been able to integrate themselves into our teams, understand our processes, understand our business, really bring that value rather than just being configurators of a product.”

Working with Onit and Hyland, Rexel Canada connected intelligent document processing with its established workflows. At the same time, OnBase provides visibility, traceability and auditability throughout the process. “We digitalized that through OnBase, and now we can know where the decision is, nudge the person sitting on it and have an audit trail that's easy to trace,” said Petit.

Rahman-Khan has been particularly impressed by the solution's ability to process invoices that historically created challenges for the team. “Moving to IDP has been especially valuable because it can accurately read even handwritten invoices, which we still receive from time to time, and I'm impressed with how far the software has progressed and how it has helped us gain efficiencies,” said Rahman-Khan.

By connecting document processing with workflow automation, Rexel Canada improved invoice handling while creating a foundation for future process modernization initiatives.

Today, invoice processing at Rexel Canada requires far fewer manual touches, giving the accounts payable team greater capacity to support the business.

Rexel Canada has also achieved substantial productivity gains across accounts payable. Invoice validation time dropped from approximately 16.5 hours to about 1.5 hours, dramatically reducing the effort required to review and process invoices. The organization has increased its capacity to support business growth without adding staff, enabling teams to process higher volumes while maintaining service levels.

Connected digital workflows accelerated approvals and improved visibility throughout the invoice lifecycle. Teams can quickly identify bottlenecks, monitor invoice status and maintain a complete audit trail, helping reduce approval turnaround times from days to minutes or hours while improving responsiveness for suppliers and internal stakeholders.

Measurement continues beyond initial deployment. Onit established reporting to monitor processing performance and an audit mechanism to verify that documents sent through IDP successfully returned for downstream processing. This gives the team visibility into processing outcomes over time rather than limiting measurement to go-live.

For the accounts payable team, automation has shifted effort away from repetitive administrative work and toward higher-value activities.

Instead of correcting OCR output, rekeying information or conducting duplicate validations, team members can focus on exception management, supplier support and continuous improvement initiatives.

That additional capacity is also visible downstream. Onit observed invoice queues decline as employees spent less time validating indexing results and were better able to keep pace with other accounts payable work. When workloads later increased, follow-up with Rexel Canada showed that the team had taken on an additional processing activity for the business rather than experiencing a decline in IDP performance.

These improvements have created a more transparent, efficient and scalable process while strengthening control over invoice handling and approvals.

The success of invoice automation is shaping how Rexel Canada approaches process improvement across the business.

The organization is exploring additional opportunities to apply intelligent document processing to operational workflows, including logistics processes that still rely on paper-based documents and manual handling. One area of interest is digitizing packing slips and other operational documents that move throughout Rexel Canada's distribution network to improve efficiency, increase visibility and streamline information flows.

For Petit, these initiatives represent an opportunity to help employees accomplish more while maintaining high service levels.

The success of the invoice automation initiative has demonstrated the potential of intelligent document processing beyond accounts payable.

“We just started with IDP, and I can already think of three or four projects where we could also use it to optimize our processes,” said Petit.

For Rexel Canada, invoice processing was a starting point. The results are helping the organization identify where intelligent document processing can address other manual, content-intensive processes and create greater capacity for its teams.