Aerospace & Defense
The Aerospace industry faces growing procurement challenges, the primary ones being around the administration of the supply chain, which represents a significant area of spend and untapped savings and which is often a source of great risk, and an over-emphasis on cost-reduction without looking at process and performance optimization. Both issues touch on the relationship and interactivity between the manufacturer and its suppliers.
A major characteristic of this industry involves the frequent exchange of engineering data, technical specifications, and production instructions between buyers and suppliers, which involve inquiries, change requests, waivers, and clarifications. This information is often exchanged using e-mail, phone calls or face-to-face meetings, all of which lead to time-consuming misunderstandings, delays, and errors.
Another is the abundance of strict quality assurance processes, which are performed manually, using e-mail or hard copy reports and documents. Invoices are then approved to pay only after quality assurance confirmation – a warehouse receipt is not sufficient. This means that companies must manually track the QA process and approve an invoice only if it is successful – a slow and error-prone process that results in payment delays.
Nipendo offers different ways to address these problems:
It’s Q&A module enables information collaboration between suppliers and customers around any, and all issues, allowing suppliers to send questions and requests to their customers in connection with a particular document or process, as well as to add attachments, manage the inquiry status and receive a built-in response from the customer. The system documents all information exchange for future tracking and auditing.
Nipendo’s Quality Management module provides complete management of all communications between the buyer and its suppliers around quality, including management of defect messages, opening of MRB, etc. Nipendo enables the configuration of process compliance guidelines in its RPA (Robotic Process Automation) engine, which then automatically validates invoices using 4-way-matching, where it waits for QA confirmation before the invoice is approved and sent to the ERP system. In the event of failure, the invoice is rejected or placed on hold, including a detailed explanation that’s sent to the supplier regarding the particular QA problems and how they can be corrected. As an example, 6% of invoices sent to a Nipendo customer in the Aerospace industry over the past 90 days were rejected while, in the same period of time, 89% of invoices were processed without human involvement.
E-invoicing: It’s all about the process
Bottom-line Benefits for you and your suppliers
- Remove process bottlenecks associated with traditional or e-invoicing
- Streamline collaboration
- Increase responsiveness
- Better manage cash flow and working capital
- Reduce the cost of doing business
Instant Invoice Reconciliation
“By providing real-time visibility to receivable worthiness and partnering with non-bank capital resources, Nipendo is expanding the range of available trade financing options at a time of great need.”
“Nipendo enables interoperability between different supplier communication solutions (for example, electronic data interchange [EDI], supplier networks and e-invoicing), allowing enterprises to rapidly achieve over 90% straight-through processing of all supplier invoices directly to their existing ERP systems.”
“Nipendo is the real deal when it comes supporting both application capability in P2P, such as e-invoicing and the connectivity or network layer itself.”
“Admittedly, we were initially reluctant to deploy Nipendo, fearing it would add to our work and possibly require the hiring of additional staff. We would likely not have done so had our customer not required us. However, after deploying the platform using a B2B connection, we realized significant benefit from it and now urge our customer to expand the platform’s utilization. We find ourselves spending far less time around invoice submission and, since we have full transparency into the process and into invoice and payment status, we no longer need to call the customer directly. Our business processes have improved significantly, and we’re better able to plan ahead.”
Chief Information Officer
“Before moving to Nipendo’s digital platform, we had to manually process hundreds of thousands of physical documents… we were sometimes late paying our suppliers… Nowadays the Electric Company receives the vast majority of invoices through Nipendo’s digital platform, which automatically examines them and provides intelligent validations… Once we started using Nipendo our work processes shortened and became more efficient. The number of people required to handle invoices was reduced and the company’s ability to comply with payment obligations to suppliers improved significantly. We’ve gotten rid of almost all of our large filing cabinets, freeing up a lot of office real estate, have done away with the exhausting filing activities and have almost completely eliminated the need to manually key-in data.”
Head of Accounting Division
“The Nipendo platform has enabled IAI to significantly improve supply chain efficiencies and supplier relations by creating transparency, and by automating the bulk of documentation along with the proper validations. This has freed up our team to address more value-add challenges, has eliminated data errors, and has enabled us to meet our SLA vis-à-vis suppliers and customers. Beyond the technology’s ability to address complex matters, the Nipendo team has demonstrated drive, flexibility, and creativity. All of this has encouraged us to move into new areas with Nipendo and to strive towards making it a one-stop-shop for IAI and its global suppliers.”
Deputy COO and VP Supply Chain
