SoftCo for Construction Supply Chain
Automating the Construction Industry
Automating the Construction Industry
The construction industry and its associated supply chain encounters diverse challenges, such as managing a complex network of suppliers, handling payment variability and large invoice volumes, dealing with retentions, ensuring compliance, maintaining documentation, resolving payment disputes, and managing cash flow. SoftCoP2P for Construction Supply Chain is specifically designed to address these unique challenges. It offers full control and visibility over finance operations, from procurement to invoice automation and payment, eradicating maverick spending, enhancing efficiency, and ensuring contract compliance. SoftCoP2P manages the request, purchase, and control of contract-based spend, with automatic alerts for renewals and expirations. Manual and duplicate processes are eliminated, providing accurate insights into spending and accruals, and accelerating month-end closure.
In addition to addressing the unique challenges of construction, SoftCoP2P delivers unrivalled savings. Smart Matching, powered by AutoML Machine Learning, revolutionizes invoice matching, resulting in an industry-leading 90% touchless invoice processing. It streamlines the complex task of processing multi-line invoices to multiple POs and handles delivery slip matching, freeing up valuable time and resources. Smart Coding and Smart Routing apply Machine Learning to automatically determine the correct routing and coding of invoices, resulting in 89% faster processing of non-PO invoices compared to manual environments. Surcharge processing is automated regardless of the way in which surcharges are presented, reducing the time to process by 95%.
SoftCoP2P is truly global, handling multiple entities and multiple currencies in multiple languages. The solution boosts your key vendor relationships by providing an efficient onboarding process and full visibility over the status of their invoices and optimizes pricing agreements with your preferred vendors.
“SoftCo has fulfilled everything that we were looking for, and more.“
Europe
£2.2b per annum
300,000
Grafton Group plc is an international distributor of building materials to trade customers primarily engaged in residential construction and maintenance.
Grafton faced challenges managing more than 300,000 vendor invoices for its 35 different locations. With 100 business approvers, vendor invoice resolution times were typically more than 40 days, resulting in slow payments, a lack of visibility, and delays in the accruals process. The manual nature of capturing and processing paper invoices meant that Grafton had high storage and labor overheads.
With SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation, Grafton has achieved straight-through processing of 75% of all vendor invoices and increased the capacity of its AP team by more than 50%. By automating its AP process, Grafton reduced its labor costs despite handling an increasing volume of invoices. Now 100% of invoices are received electronically into Grafton. These results have allowed Grafton Ireland to achieve a year one return on investment.
“In my 45+ years in the workplace, the SoftCo project
is the best implementation experience I’ve had.”
SoftCo Vendor Management delivers the benefits of working efficiently with preferred Vendors. Purchasing is optimized, costs reduced, and administration is eliminated. The cloud-based solution ensures Vendors have full online visibility of all orders and invoices and queries and disputes are addressed immediately.
SoftCo Pre-Approved Spend functionality enables a seamless drawdown on pre-agreed budgets and the generation of purchase orders for spend with preferred vendors, without delay. Department budgets are not exceeded and spend with your vendors is controlled.
SoftCo eProcurement (electronic procurement software) ensures a quick and efficient purchasing process for all operational spend, in full compliance with your organization’s procurement policies. SoftCo eProcurement software streamlines capital, recurring and operational spend.
SoftCo non-PO invoice handling reduces processing time by up to 90%, with industry leading compliance and audit checks. SoftCo Non-PO Smart Coding intelligently identifies and learns coding patterns allowing it to automatically code invoices, saving time and eliminating error.
SoftCo Contract Compliance closely integrates with all SoftCo P2P modules. It manages the request, purchase and control of contract-based spend within eProcurement and facilitates contract and invoice matching within AP with comprehensive reports. The solution alerts you for contract expiry or renewals. All contracts and supporting information are stored in the SoftCo Compliant Archive.
SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation delivers an accelerated, secure invoice approval process with configurable automated workflows. With multiple verifiers and approvers, invoices are routed for approval, automated email notifications are sent, followed by reminders. Un-actioned invoices are routed to an alternative approver, ensuring minimal process delay.
SoftCo Accounts Payable Automation captures all invoice data, regardless of the format received from your Vendors, using advanced Data Capture technology or via SoftCo’s outsource data capture service. Processing times are improved, and keying errors eliminated.
SoftCoPay transforms payments from a cost center to a profit center by reducing costs, earning rebates, mitigating payment risk, and optimizing payment type. Payments are streamlined into an easy to use workflow. The seamless process, from receipt of invoice to vendor payment, delivers control and transparency with straightforward reconciliation through your ERP and a fully auditable payment process.
The SoftCo Matching Engine uses advanced RPA technology removing all manual elements of invoice matching, delivering an error-free, efficient process for all invoice types. The SoftCo Smart Matching engine applies Machine Learning technology to even the most complicated matching scenarios, such as incomplete data, missing product codes, and FX conversions to deliver 90% match rates.
SoftCo delivers industry leading analytics to empower organizations to make informed decisions. SoftCoP2P offers both SoftCo Advanced Analytics, part of the SoftCo solution, and the ability to integrate with 3rd party analytics tools. The platform provides accurate, real-time information over AP productivity, invoice processing rates and payments performance.
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SoftCo’s unique AutoML Machine learning automates the time-consuming and iterative tasks associated with Invoice Automation, delivering unparalleled savings for the customer, with full auditability and control.
Utilizing millions of real data from Industry, Operations, Organizations, and Suppliers, the SoftCo AutoML Machine Learning engine ‘learns’ and improves based on 250+ match ‘patterns’ and applies this automation to SoftCo Smart Matching models, including tolerance, aggregation, and confidence match criteria. SoftCo AutoML uses real-time dynamic data. Instead of relying on stale static data, the engine learns immediately every time an invoice finishes processing, constantly improving automation customized to the specific organization.
Machine Learning (ML) is a game-changer in automating both PO and Non-PO invoicing, with full transparency and auditability. Manual invoice processing can cost $16 per invoice, whereas high invoice automation, driven by AutoML reduces processing costs by over 90%. The same ML technology is applied to the coding and routing of invoices, which are optimized by AutoML based on continuous learned patterns.
The results are unrivaled, and the savings exceptional. SoftCo delivers 90% straight through processing for PO invoices and 89% faster processing of Non-PO invoices.
Seamless, secure and timely integration with the Finance system or ERP is a key part of any P2P or AP Automation solution. Integrating your ERP with SoftCo will expand its capabilities, making it a more powerful business tool than ever before. SoftCo SmartConnect is a secure, highly configurable cloud based platform which manages all of the data exchange between the ERP and SoftCo. SoftCo integrates seamlessly with existing ERP systems at a single point, thus offering access to real-time information and data.
SoftCo SmartConnect has seamlessly integrated with over 200 ERP’s including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Infor, Sage and multiple industry specific and even bespoke ERP’s.
eBook
Retail organizations are encountering industry-specific challenges. Learn how automation can resolve the significant challenges of manual AP processes and the value it adds to the retail supply chain.
On-Demand Webinar
Learn how SoftCoAP simplifies and accelerates the process of capturing and accounting for different types of surcharges, to ensure accuracy over the true costs of goods and materials.
Blog
Here we run-through important accounts payable performance metrics that can be monitored to ensure that your AP department is running both efficiently and effectively.
