Case Study: Leading Bottling Company achieves more than double AP productivity and over 50% headcount reduction with Tungsten Automation

Bottling company launches new self-service web portal for quicker, easier supplier invoicing

This bottling company that bottles and distributes soft drinks, water, juices and energy drinks processes more than 200,000 invoices a year from over 1,000 vendors. After consolidating AP into a shared services center and deploying Kofax ReadSoft Process Director to standardize workflows, the team still relied heavily on manual scanning and validation of paper invoices (about 20,000 invoices/month) to meet regulatory retention requirements, creating delays, high workload and a dedicated scanning team.

The company implemented a self-service supplier portal (Kofax ReadSoft Supplier Portal for SAP) and an internal Process Director web portal so suppliers can upload invoices, have key data auto-extracted and pre-populated, and track invoice status while internal teams handle exceptions through automated workflows. The result: AP productivity has more than doubled, invoices processed per FTE rose from ~5,000 to >12,000 annually, monthly volume climbed to ~30,000, processing is ~20% faster, scanning headcount fell from 12 to 5 (>50% reduction), and supplier email inquiries dropped about 70%.