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:
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.
Intelligent Document Processing with invoice filtering to avoid unnecessary ABBYY license consumption
Targeted data extraction and indexing into relevant ERP
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.