Exela introduced AP automation for a large company in the casual dining industry, which resulted in the company saving 40% in costs.
Challenge
Brinker International, a recognized leader in the casual dining industry, serves over one million guests in its restaurants daily. Its 38-year history has seen the organization grow and change from a single restaurant in Dallas, Texas into one that now boasts more than 15,000 locations in 33 countries and two American territories.
Due to its growth, Brinker International was faced with high labor costs associated with handling over 200,000 paper invoices per month from over 1,700 restaurant locations nationwide. With no immediate plans to integrate the stores with the corporate office and no central document repository, Brinker's AP department had limited insight or management of the invoice control process. In addition, there was no formal quality assurance program, with only minimal reporting and reconciliation processes in place.
Solution
Exela introduced mailroom operations, including scanning and OCR services to support all restaurant invoice ingestion, indexing, and validation. Exela's Box Office Enterprise Information Management and Procure to Pay (P2P) platform operated at the core of the solution.
Exela also provided workflow optimization in a centralized image repository. Outcomes would be thoroughly reported via a user-friendly web-based dashboard using Rule14's module called Athena.
Additionally, a formal quality assurance program was developed.
Benefits
- Brinker realized a savings of 40% in implementing the solutions
- Real-time access to vendor invoices for follow-up
- Reduced the amount of time required to process invoices
- Enhanced web-based reporting and reconciliation process help the client keep a handle on their AP situation and enabled them to close their accounting in a timely manner
