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British Polythene Industries Plc (BPI) is Europe’s largest manufacturer of polythene products, and is based in North-East England. As part of the launch of its UK Shared Services Centre (SSC), BPI have implemented an Accounts Payable automation solution that uses Paradatec’s PROSAR-AIDA technology.
The new SSC is expected to save the company around £150,000 per annum as a result of reducing the time spent for manually processing invoices by at least 50%. Initially, the project will serve four BPI operation divisions, but this number should increase to seven by the end of 2007.
BPI is the largest manufacturer of polythene film, bags and sacks in Europe, with manufacturing capacity in excess of 350,000 tonnes per annum. They employ 6,000 people and have an annual turnover in excess of £410m.
The Greenock-based SSC will centralise all adminstrative functions including payroll, credit control, financial reporting and accounts payable for the company’s 24 UK regional bases. It will standardise all processes and form a key element of the company’s strategic planning, enabling divisional managers to focus on developing business relationships and delivering value-added services.
The Paradatec implementation is running on a Kofax Ascent platform and automatically captures data from the the invoices, which is then fed into BPI’s A/P workflow. The overall solution allows managers to view any invoice-related document from any location, helping to streamline the payment process.
Jackie Fullerton, Director of Shared Services at BPI said: “Accounts payable has been the major investment in the project, and is now bringing the major rewards in terms of cost savings and efficiency gains. We expect that return on investment to be around 12-18 months, following full roll-out”. | 
BPI
