Case Study: Sonae achieves 100% paperless, 75% touchless accounts payable and €13M annual savings with Tungsten Automation

Sonae Automates Accounts Payable to Enable 100% Paperless and 75% touchless Processes

Sonae, Portugal’s largest retailer with over 1,300 stores and roughly 40,000 employees, faced a major accounts-payable challenge: processing more than three million supplier invoices (plus ~500,000 internal invoices) — over 10,000 documents daily — most of them paper-based. The company needed a fast, accurate and cost-effective way to capture payment discounts, maintain control and scale invoice handling across tens of thousands of suppliers.

Sonae implemented a Kofax-based document management platform with full scanning, EDI for electronic document exchange, a DH-Document Handler for routing to ERP systems, and automated invoice-matching and approval. The result: a fully paperless AP function and 75% touchless processing (with a goal of 85%), average invoice record/match/approval time of 1.2 days, and estimated annual savings of about €13 million through reduced manual work, better accuracy and improved capture of payment discounts.

Sonae

Nuno Guerreiro

Head of Deliver