Rexel Canada accelerates invoice automation with Hyland IDP™

Industry: Electrical distribution/wholesale
Location: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Organization size: 1,000-5,000 employees
Hyland solutions: Hyland IDP™, Hyland Automate™, Hyland OnBase™
Partner: Onit, OT Group

Rexel Canada was navigating increasing invoice volume and complexity across a large and dynamic supplier base for their non-trade suppliers. By implementing Hyland IDP, the organization shifted from template- and rule-driven invoice capture to AI-driven, semantic understanding — accelerating automation, reducing exceptions and creating a scalable foundation for broader enterprise digital transformation beyond accounts payable (AP).

Prior to implementing Hyland IDP, Rexel Canada faced growing operational strain as invoice processing scaled in volume, vendor diversity and document complexity. Nontrade accounts payable teams spent significant time on manual review and exception handling — especially for invoices from new or infrequent vendors, where even small layout differences required intervention.

Traditional layout-based automation also slowed time to value, often requiring weeks or months of tuning before meaningful straight-through processing could be achieved. Nonstandard invoices — such as low-quality scans, handwritten fields and complex formats — created frequent rework. Rexel also needed an approach that could scale beyond invoice-only use cases to support a longer-term enterprise automation strategy.

To address these challenges, Rexel Canada, in partnership with Onit and OT Group, implemented Hyland Content Innovation Cloud™ with IDP as a cloud-first, AI-driven automation solution tightly integrated with enterprise content management and workflow orchestration.

Using generative AI and large language models (LLMs), Hyland IDP semantically interprets invoices — understanding meaning and context rather than relying on templates, zones or anchors. This enabled Rexel to automate invoice classification, data extraction, validation and exception handling with minimal configuration.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Prompt-based configuration, allowing business users to define extraction logic in natural language rather than complex rules

• Semantic document separation and classification, eliminating the need for manual document sorting

• Contextual line-item extraction, improving performance on complex and “messy” invoices

• Continuous learning, where corrections improve accuracy across document types

• End-to-end workflow integration, enabling validation and exception handling directly within Hyland workflows

Hyland’s native gen AI and LLM capabilities within Hyland IDP are tightly integrated into Hyland OnBase, embedding AI-driven document understanding directly into enterprise workflows with unified governance, security and audit trails. Native workflow orchestration also supports integration to downstream ERP and financial systems. This architecture helped Rexel move quickly from pilot to production while laying a foundation for broader automation.

Implementing Content Innovation Cloud with IDP delivered immediate, measurable results for Rexel Canada, including higher straight-through processing and significantly fewer manual invoice exceptions — dramatically reducing the effort required from AP teams.

Rexel also reduced configuration and training time, and new vendor invoices were processed successfully most of the time without retraining. The solution achieved stronger automation on handwritten fields, low-quality scans and uncommon formats compared to traditional layout-learning approaches. As a result, AP teams now can focus on exceptions and higher value analysis, improving nontrade supplier satisfaction and internal responsiveness.

Rexel Canada plans to expand the Content Innovation Cloud with IDP beyond invoice processing as part of a broader enterprise automation strategy. Future plans may include extending intelligent document processing to additional document types such as logistics documents using the same AI models with minimal additional configuration.

The organization views Content Innovation Cloud with IDP as a strategic platform to support innovation, efficiency and growth for years to come as part of their Axelerate 2028 strategy.