Case Study: Industrial Manufacturing Company achieves automated payment approvals, faster cycles and $300K savings with SAP Ariba

Integrated Solutions and Standardized Processes Automate Payment Approvals and Cycles for $1.2B in Global Spending

A global specialty gases and chemicals industrial manufacturer managing $1.2B in spend needed to optimize its procure-to-pay process. It faced heavy paper use, slow supplier payments, missed early‑payment discounts, frequent invoice exceptions and poor interoperability with its single-instance SAP system.

The company implemented Ariba procurement, invoicing, Network, working-capital and discount-management solutions integrated with SAP to enable paperless invoicing, automated approvals, exception handling and supplier collaboration. As a result automated spend rose from $708M to $1.182B; approval time fell from 14 to under 4 days; blocked invoices >7 days dropped from 9% to 5%; discount capture increased to 79% (≈$300K saved); days past terms improved from 9 to 2; and weekly inquiry calls decreased from 700 to 285.