Case Study
Global flooring manufacturer cuts AP costs with supplier e-invoicing
Industry
Function
Topic
Results
$3M+
Saved $3M+ annually on AP
60%+
Reduced AP headcount by 60%+ via attrition
26K+
Onboarded 26,000+ suppliers to e-invoicing
Company Profile
Publicly traded global flooring manufacturer producing ceramic, hard-surface, and soft flooring for residential and commercial channels across the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Approximately 40,000 employees worldwide, with annual revenue in the $10B range. A category leader among floor-covering suppliers, with vertically integrated manufacturing across multiple product families.
Challenge
AP buried under 600,000+ paper invoices a year
Month-end was a paper avalanche. The AP team processed invoices for more than 8,000 suppliers, with the top thousand or so suppliers alone accounting for over 600,000 invoices a year. Paper documents dominated the environment, driving up labor cost, slowing supplier payments, and creating audit exposure under new Sarbanes-Oxley controls.
Adding headcount each year was not sustainable. Cutting paper out of the cycle would also advance the company’s green commitments, since paper-heavy AP ran counter to the eco-friendly credentials the business wanted to project. The team needed suppliers to submit electronically at scale and a footing for AP that could keep up with growth without expanding the back office.
Solution
From paper avalanche to portal-led invoicing at scale
The company brought in a supplier-portal e-invoicing network and started with the top thousand or so suppliers by invoice volume. Within five months, more than 75% of that supplier cohort had enrolled and was submitting electronically, cutting roughly 400,000 paper invoices a year out of the AP cycle and bringing operating cost down with it.
The program then extended in two directions. Suppliers gained self-service visibility into payment status through the portal, reducing inbound payment-status inquiries to the AP team. Purchase-order data was sent into the network for front-end validation, enabling automated three-way matching between PO, receipt, and invoice. Straight-through processing improved more than 50% on the validated flow, with cleaner data reducing exception handling and freeing the team for higher-value work.
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