Aerospace Leader Saves 12k+ Hours with Accounts Payable Automation

Our client is one of the largest defense and aerospace manufacturers in the U.S., delivering advanced technologies across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Their solutions serve both government and commercial markets.

In 2023, the company acquired another major defense supplier, adding additional systems, processes, and invoice volume to an already fragmented Accounts Payable operation. Meanwhile, funding for automation and integration initiatives was set to expire by year-end, putting urgency behind digital transformation.

Within the Global Business Services (GBS) organization, Accounts Payable (AP) was shouldering the burden of legacy sprawl and their internal automation CoE couldn't keep up. The AP team processed:

• 9,000 invoices/month from PeopleSoft alone

• 17,000 more through SAP

• 4,000 additional via Oracle

The current AP process followed disparate paths across multiple legacy systems, ERPs, and solutions, causing manual burdens and technical debt for the GBS operations and IT support team.  

The growth-through-acquisition strategy demanded something different: a unified, standardized AP process that could scale with them. Without it, every new acquisition would add administrative friction and block growth.

Ashling was introduced by a global advisory firm during the early phases of their digital transformation program. After a competitive evaluation, Ashling was selected to deliver enterprise-grade automation and boost internal automation capabilities, beginning with the standardization of AP.

Our objectives were clear:

• Consolidate invoice intake across systems
• Orchestrate automation with cost-effective Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
• Accelerate processing to meet integration targets
• Reduce reliance on manual and outsourced labor
• Build a repeatable automation framework for future growth

Ashling deployed an orchestrated solution using accounts payable automation tools like Blue Prism and ABBYY Vantage. Digital Workers now retrieve emails and route attachments for classification and extraction. ABBYY’s Splitter skill isolates high-value invoice data while filtering out low-value content. Processed data is then routed into PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle based on the originating business unit.

Solution Overview

1. Load Queue: Retrieve emails with attachments from mailboxes and Send attachments to ABBYY 

2. Intelligent Document Processing with invoice filtering to avoid unnecessary ABBYY license consumption

3. Targeted data extraction and indexing into relevant ERP

4. Centralized MI reports for transparency and auditing

Our client can now leverage early payment discounts, improve vendor satisfaction, and importantly, enable further growth through Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) with their new standardized AP process. The impact of the solution? Let's take a look:

• 30,000+ monthly invoices now routed through automated pipelines

• Reduced license spend by offloading non-critical invoice metadata processing

• Improved vendor satisfaction via faster turnaround

• Access to early payment discounts that were previously missed

• Boosted internal morale by freeing up teams from manual, repetitive work

As Ashling continues partnering with this aerospace leader, we’re focused on increasing automation intelligence and reducing human intervention. We continue to explore GenAI-powered extraction methods to handle unstructured invoice formats that ABBYY struggles with today, expanding straight-through processing and minimizing human-in-the-loop exception handling.

While optimizing Accounts Payable can unlock major efficiencies, it’s just one part of the broader financial operations puzzle. Deductions management—where invalid short-pays and chargebacks often go unresolved for weeks—is another critical area ripe for transformation.

Technology Used