LuLu Group International has a wide-ranging business portfolio, but retail is the cornerstone of what we do. Around the world, we have over 260 stores with a combined floor area of more than 1.1 million square meters, offering high-quality products to millions of customers every year.
We’ve placed the customer experience at the heart of our long-term growth strategy. Our goal is to deliver smooth, high-quality journeys wherever our customers shop: from our e-commerce sites to our brick-and-mortar stores.
To deliver sparkling customer services, it’s crucial to keep our shelves stocked. To make that process run smoothly, our in-store teams work behind the scenes to receive goods from our network of global suppliers. With over 14 million stock-keeping units, keeping up with a continual flow of supplier deliveries is no easy task.
In the past, our goods-receiving process was extremely paper-heavy. Suppliers would bring paper invoices to the goods-receiving areas of our stores, which our teams needed to manually match to the corresponding purchase orders before they could accept the deliveries. The whole process was very time-consuming, which often meant there was a significant lead time in getting new products on the shelf.
Reducing reliance on paper
To make the goods-receiving process flow more quickly and smoothly, we realized that we needed to take a fresh approach to accounts payable (AP). If we could remove the need for our teams to spend time leafing through paper invoices, we knew we’d unlock big time-savings that would ultimately help us get products ready for sale faster.
Our search for an AP automation solution led us straight to OpenText. As well as being leaders in the information management space, OpenText has a very strong strategic relationship with SAP—the technology platform our business is built on. When we evaluated the capabilities of OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions and OpenText Intelligent Capture, we knew we’d found the solution we were looking for.
Transforming AP processes
Using the OpenText solutions, we’ve transformed our AP process. Today, our suppliers send us their invoices in advance of delivery. We use Intelligent Capture to automatically extract the necessary data from the documents and then use Vendor Invoice Management to match each invoice to its corresponding purchase order in SAP.
When suppliers deliver to our stores, our goods-receiving teams scan the invoices using a handheld device. If the solution can validate all the information is correct, our teams get instant confirmation that they can accept the delivery. For compliance purposes, we store copies of all paper invoices off-site and use OpenText Archive Center for SAP Solutions to retain a copy of the invoice data.
Going live in just six months
By working closely with experts from OpenText Professional Services, we went live with our new digital AP process in just six months—a big achievement for a project considering the large number of stakeholders involved. At every step, OpenText helped us to engage with our in-store teams and suppliers and ensure the new workflow would meet their needs.
It’s now been five years since we first started our collaboration with OpenText, and the results we’ve achieved are outstanding. Our digital workflow for AP enables us to process invoices with a 70% straight-through processing rate. When you consider that we receive nine million invoices a year, that level of automation translates into massive time-savings for our teams.
Most importantly, the OpenText solutions are enabling us to get new products on our shelves faster than ever. We’ve accelerated our goods-receiving processes by an estimated 50%, which helps us to ensure our customers can always find their desired products when they visit our stores.
To learn more about how OpenText solutions are underpinning high-quality customer experiences at LuLu Group, click here to read our case study or watch the video below.