How ClearDox Revolutionized Invoice Management for a Sugar Trading Giant
Summary
- Czarnikow, a global supply chain solutions provider in the agri products and energy industries, faced inefficiencies in manual invoice processing — detracting from business growth opportunities.
- The manual process also increased the risk of delayed or inaccurate payments, potentially harming relationships with both product and freight vendors critical for their supply chain.
- Czarnikow approached ClearDox, hoping their digitization and automation solution for invoices would significantly reduce the manual data entry, improve payment accuracy and timeliness, while also freeing up their skilled employees for higher-value tasks.
- ClearDox worked with Czarnikow to seamlessly integrate the intelligent application for invoice management with Czarnikow's CTRM and custom document management systems, standardizing the data capture process across their global operations.
- Following the success in invoice management, Czarnikow plans to explore ClearDox’s other intelligent applications for inventory validation and shipping management.
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The Challenge: Inefficient Payables, Wasted Time, and Wasted Talent
Founded in 1861 as a sugar brokerage firm, Czarnikow today is a global supply chain solutions provider within the agri products, food ingredients and packaging, and energy industries. The company sources, trades, moves and de-risks commodities through a range of services including physical and derivatives trading, financing, consulting, and freight and logistics management.
But one area of their operations wasn’t sugar-sweet: Their 16 global offices were wasting hours on manual invoice processing.
Highly skilled employees were tied up poring over documentation from more than 350 product and freight vendors — and rekeying data instead of focusing on business growth. The inconsistent processes increased the risks of duplicate or fraudulent remittances. This inefficiency delayed payments and even resulted in missed or inaccurate disbursements, negatively affecting critical vendor relationships.
The need for a solution to allow them to scale and support their growing business was evident.
"We had invoices coming in from different business units and different vendors, all relying on timely payment. There was too much manual work slowing everybody down and tying up skilled employees. We knew we had to automate."
The Solution: An Intelligent Application + Commodity Expertise
Because ClearDox is made up entirely of commodities industry experts, they knew how to work with Czarnikow’s precise needs.
To solve the issue seamlessly, the team integrated the ClearDox solution with Czarnikow’s CTRM system and proprietary document storage system. The solution included an intelligent application that employed AI-models specific to the payables process. The models and underlying AI technologies adapted varied depending on the vendors and the type of data to be collected, ensuring a more rapid and efficient onboarding.
Once ClearDox was in place, both teams worked to standardize their processes globally for all vendors, so all invoice documentation would first pass through the ClearDox system. This would allow for all the data to be extracted from invoices and automatically processed, with only exceptions being flagged for manual review.
The digital data was not only normalized and immediately accessible to downstream systems, but it was also enhanced with key custom look-up fields requested by the Czarnikow team. This allowed Czarnikow to reliably automate and digitize invoices and spend much less time on manual entry.
ClearDox also worked with Czarnikow to prioritize their 350+ unique vendors from most to least frequent invoice issuers ensuring a quicker impact to the business.
The Results: Instant Invoice Data and Much More
ClearDox’s platform and intelligent application helped Czarnikow vastly improve the efficiency of the team. The automated invoice processing reduced manual data entry, freeing up skilled staff for higher-value tasks, while allowing the team to scale their work output more effectively.
The changes also improved payment accuracy and timeliness, strengthening vendor relations and operational resilience. An added benefit was that additional data elements like pick-up time or drop-off time could be captured and shared across the organization, improving operational decisions.
What’s more, the integration was completed start-to-finish in just three months, showcasing ClearDox’s ability to quickly adapt and meet Czarnikow’s needs. And Czarnikow was so happy with the platform’s performance for its invoices, they plan to start using it for inventory validation and shipping management next.