Background
Xerox (Europe) Ltd operates a European Business Service Centre at Ballycoolin, Dublin, which includes customer services and a shared financial services centre. As well as providing Finance and Administration Services to Xerox customers, the Shared Service Centre processed Xerox’s own accounts payable and other financial documents, including invoices, credit notes, statements, travel and expenses, and purchase orders.

The Challenge
When the Shared Service Centre was established in 1998, it offered the most cost and process-effective way of administering Xerox’s business on a European basis. The main Xerox locations in Europe; UK, France, Germany and DSE sent their invoices and other financial documents to the Centre, where they were scanned and indexed according to category. Each document was processed and entered into the ERP and approved for payment. SLA’s were set to ensure payments were made in good time to ensure Xerox achieved maximum discount capability for early payment to Preferred Suppliers.

Over a period of time it became apparent that the Centre was struggling to deliver the economies of scale it had once achieved and a decision was made to assess the benefits of invoice processing outsourcing. Having reviewed the responses from the invited companies on the Shared Service Centre solution, Xerox made a corporate decision to enter into an outsource agreement for end-to-end processing of its accounts payable and other financial  documents, in order to improve productivity and cost efficiencies awarding the management of the Accounts Payable Process to Xerox Global Services (XGS) and all other financial management processes including control of the ERP to IBM.

The Solution
The implementation of the Accounts Payable Scanning, indexing and workflow solution and feed to IBM was completed and the project transferred to operations in just six weeks. Delivering full operational capability inclusive of SLA and full reporting suite for assessment of both XGS and IBM performance.