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1. How to Avoid the Single Point of
Project Failure & Reach 80%
Electronic Invoicing
John Whitlow – Head of Purchasing

2. Areas to be covered
AGENDA
•Imperial College London – Background
•Process Management – P2P
•Challenges Faced when Improving the Pay Stage
•Our IT Systems
•What the Pay Stage looked like in 2006
•Business Case & Review of the Pay Stage
•How we changed the Pay Stage in 2006 and why we decided to partner
with OB10
•Benefits and Challenges of Electronic Invoicing
•Close - Questions

3. Imperial at a glance
The University’s objectives:
• world class scholarship, education
and research in science, technology
and medicine
• interdisciplinary collaborations
• communicate and share knowledge
Established in 1907
Turnover of £600 million
Academic faculties:
• Engineering
• Natural Sciences
• Medicine
• plus Business School

4. Our Management Approach to Process Management – Electronic
Invoicing
•Use technology to achieve process improvements and
efficiencies.
•Exploit IT opportunities to deliver sustainable cost and
performance benefits.
•Enable full automation of the pay process and eliminate
unmatched invoices and improve immediate invoice
registration.
•Improve risk management regarding supplier payments
and VAT reclaim.
•Increase invoices paid on time and enable early-
payment discounts.
•improve invoice exception management.
•Reduce supplier queries.
•Reduce the cost of archiving and use of space.

5. Challenges faced when exploring how we could deliver
improvements when investigating how we pay our suppliers
•The College would have to invest money and time to improve the pay process and
deliver the expected benefits.
•Full benefits were likely to be delivered over a 1-2 year timeframe, allowing time for
changes to take place and solutions to be rolled out. Sustained commitment was
therefore required.
•e-Enablement would need to play a much greater role in enforcing compliance across
the organisation.
•Process efficiencies had to comprise of opportunities for budget savings where a role
could be re-allocated or removed and opportunities to undertake different tasks from
increased capacity.
•There was a choice of technology solutions. We needed to assess what was the right
solution, or combination of solutions.
•Delivering the benefits was about changing current practice. Change management
would therefore be critical to our success.

6. Our IT Systems – Oracle Financials
•We are a mature Oracle house using the Advanced
Procurement Suite and the Oracle Accounts Payable
Module
• We implemented Oracle in 1999 - All purchasing is
undertaken using iProcurement – we have 2,000 on-line
users.
• We “punch-out” to 20 MRO suppliers including HP, Sigma,
VWR, RS Components, Office Depot and through this route
send out our purchase orders using XML.
• Content management - Supplier catalogues are also
maintained on system for other mainstream suppliers.
• Oracle iSourcing is in place principally to undertake
electronic reverse auctions but eventually will look after the
whole electronic tendering piece.
• Oracle Accounts Payable was in use but until 2006 we had
not explored how we could improve the whole procure to
pay process. Greater focus was therefore given to Pay and
options for improvement explored.

7. The Pay Process in 2006
•We processed on average 170K paper based invoices each year.
•The majority of invoices were posted to us and were then keyed in by staff in our
central Accounts Payable Team.
•Once keyed and checked invoices were photocopied and posted out via the
internal mail to administrators in all our departments ready for authorisation. This
equated to 140,000 items of mail being sent out each year to different parts of the
College.
•The departmental administrators would then be expected to check and forward
invoices on to staff in their own department for final authorisation.
•Unless departmental staff notified central Accounts Payable of any issues with an
invoice it would be processed by the settlement date if below £10K in value.
•All invoices above £10K in value were automatically put on system hold and
required active authorisation before approval.
•The cost of processing an invoice this way was approximately £2.50.

8. Review of the Pay Process
•Management recognition that the Pay process was inefficient and didn’t work that well
in practice. There was scope for serious improvement and cost reduction.
•Our aim was to receive invoices electronically, have a high level of matching, and
streamline the internal authorisation process.
1)Electronic invoicing – Looked at solutions from Oracle (iSupplier Portal) and OB10
focusing on how we could receive a large percentage of our invoice transactions from
both large and small suppliers – Right first time.
•Matching of Invoices – we not only wanted to receive invoices electronically but also
wanted high levels of matching – touch-less end-to-end processing . This suited our
profile where a high percentage of our purchase orders were being transmitted
electronically so perfect data was being sent to suppliers so this data could be flipped
and sent back. We ruled out doing this directly.
•Authorisation process – once received invoices could be automatically matched on our
system so the next initiative was to have electronic workflow whereby invoices could be
sent to the user for checking and authorisation.

9. Model adopted and why we selected OB10 as our Provider
•Electronic Invoicing – We selected OB10 as they had an established network of
suppliers, provided a single solution for transmission by both small and large
suppliers, fully understood our business requirements and submitted a very
competitive transaction fee for their service.
•Matching of Invoices – Although there are benefits in removing paper invoices from
the process there are even greater benefits if you can automatically match invoice
data with purchase order line detail. This truly enabled a “touch-less” process and
was the single largest benefit for Imperial.
•Authorisation process – By receiving invoices electronically from OB10 the format
would be standardised. This afforded us an opportunity to revisit how we archive
and present the data to our users. The data from OB10 is now collected by
Storetext, our invoice scanning provider, and available on-line to all our users.
•This removed 140K items of internal mail saving us at least £30K per annum. At
the same time we introduced electronic email alerts notifying users that invoices are
ready to be paid. Again this was a major service improvement for our users.

10. Benefits of Introducing OB10 & the Challenges
•Benefits
• Reduced the cost of processing a transaction from £2.50 to less than £1.00.
• Enabled head-count reductions in our central Account Payable function saving in excess
of £100,000 per annum.
• We are now processing in excess of 100K invoices per annum.
• Allowed a single approach to be adopted for the receipt of invoices.
• Reduced the volume of paper and associated storage.
• Reduced the level of telephone queries from suppliers.
• Facilitated the implementation of an improved authorisation process and removal of
unnecessary administrative procedures.
•Challenges
• Change management – structural and cultural.
• Quality of data – integrity of data is key.
• Supplier enrolment and building the network – joint responsibility.
• To improve our transaction level and move towards 75-80% 2009.

11. Thank you – Any Questions