AP Automation Case Study: Canadian North – Microsoft Dynamics  

Canadian North, one of Canada’s leading airline companies, uses EchoVera’s AP Automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics to automate financial management and improve operational efficiencies.

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Key Outcomes:

• Canadian North uses Cloud-based ASAP and AI to automate the processing of $300 million in supplier invoices per year
• Canadian North realizes significant visibility and measurable cost savings
• The strong ROI on the initial deployment of AP automation has prompted Canadian North to move towards the implementation of Purchase Automation.

“The biggest benefit we have gained…is transparency over accounts payable activity across the entire organization.“ – Jeff MacPherson, Senior Manager Finance & Procurement – Canadian North

The Challenge

With locations in Edmonton, Calgary and Iqaluit, Canadian North needed a better way to track invoices and other AP related documents as they moved through the organization. Valuable resources were committed to manually processing over 30,000 invoices per year and Canadian North needed to manage cost control. This included the processing of fuel and catering related invoices, their highest volume and dollar value suppliers.

The scanning and manual data entry of paper and emailed invoices meant that it would take several days to get a supplier invoice into the system. There was also a lack of visibility into the status of supplier invoices, what accounts payable balances were in real time, and where invoices were in the approval process.

EchoVera’s AP Automation Solution

• Invoice Data Capture
  Intelligent OCR intuitively performs field mapping and data collection of Canadian North’s supplier invoices and processes them directly from email – eliminating the need to print or perform data entry. It uses AI to process both mailed and emailed invoices and captures relevant invoice fields, intuitively performing field mapping and data collection. As a result, most invoices are processed in minutes without manual intervention.

• Approval Workflow
  EchoVera AP provides an approval workflow in a central dashboard, and automatically sends invoices to managers to review, approve, and code. Once approved, invoices are sent to Canadian North’s Dynamics..

• Archive and Audit
  EchoVera AP provides Canadian North with a step-by-step documented history of invoice transactions, including communications between internal staff and suppliers. The solution also has a complete searchable archive and a framework that provides objectivity for enquiries or investigations.

Future Plans

Immediate success with key vendors led the airline to quickly expand their e-invoicing initiative by increasing the number of suppliers. The end goal is to process all invoices from every supplier – a goal that will be achieved over time. The success of the initial ASAP automation implementation has led Canadian North to begin the process of incorporating  Purchase Automation in the near future.