AP/AR Automation in Technicolor Operations

About Technicolor

Technicolor, a global producer of high-quality electronic equipment for the Media & Entertainment sector, is at the forefront of digital innovation. Technicolor’s operations are based on three segments namely Technology, Entertainment Services, and Connected Home. Technicolor has been contributing to the development of video technologies and services for one hundred years. The company now occupies leading positions worldwide in the supply of digital production, postproduction and distribution solutions and services for a variety of content creators, Pay-TV operators and network service providers. By solving real problems and addressing industry challenges in its operating businesses, the Group builds relevant innovation.

Business Challenges

The scale of Technicolor’s international operations resulted in the need to manage large volumes of procure-to-pay processes for which optimization in below areas is expected:

Automate registration of incoming financial documents
Process tracking
Compromised reporting and KPI measurement,
Integration with ERP solutions
Adjustment of workflow to business processes
Flexibility in the workflow

Thus, the main goal of Comarch e-Invoicing implementation was to structure the end-to-end accounts payable process while providing desired automation and user-friendliness. Moreover, Technicolor required robust workflows to exactly reflect their business processes and to eliminate unnecessary emails and phone calls.

The Implemented Product

Comarch e-Invoicing solution allowed Technicolor to redesign, streamline and automate the processing of financial documents. This implementation was bundled with the Global Accounts Payable process unification and therefore Comarch’s role was to work closely with Technicolor to build a comprehensive and flexible solution. In order to fulfill the client’s needs, Comarch deployed a proprietary SaaS product and provided consulting and development services during the project implementation phase.

Comarch e-Invoicing solution enables or facilitates the following processes:

Capturing incoming invoices from all channels (paper, PDF sent by e-mail and EDI)
Automated data extraction (OCR) and validation
Workflow of cost assignment
Verification and acceptance
Invoice archiving in an electronic repository
Two direction, manageable synchronisation of data with nine enterprise resource planning systems (ERP)

The Results

After a successful implementation, Technicolor achieved crucial objectives set out at the very beginning of the project. Users of Comarch’s solution within Technicolor are benefiting from a variety of features and in their opinion the most important of these are:

High automation rate
Flexibility of workflow adjustment
Integration possibilities
System usability
Single sign-on functionality
Delivery model (SaaS)

Comarch e-Invoicing is not only a convenient and efficient system for Technicolor and its employees (end users) but it also impacts their business results. According to Technicolor, the cooperation with Comarch has resulted in a wide range of benefits, including:

Process quality improvement
Shortening the invoice approval process
Auditable and streamlined processes
Centralization of all AP invoices into one place,
Self service functionality: all users have access to the status of their invoices
Improved relations with suppliers

Implementation process

According to Technicolor, the main factors in Comarch being selected above the competition in a detailed RFP process was the flexibility of the solution and the numerous references provided by existing clients.

It took less than five months to design and implement a global solution that was initially deployed across two business entities. Then within another three months the system was successfully introduced in all 34 business entities. Overall the project took 10 months from beginning to end. The project was a particular challenge due to the complex structure and global nature of the companies within the Technicolor parent group. Thanks to the flexibility of Comarch’s solution it was possible to integrate it within two working days.

Remarks from Technicolor

Prior to the implementation of the Comarch solution, a lot of time and manual effort was put into document registration and processing. The cost assignment and approval required a lot of e-mail communication making it hard to track and manage processes and progress. The lack of integration with the ERP system meant that data from approved invoices needed to be registered manually and it might have impact on their accuracy. Now, after the Comarch project we are equipped with a comprehensive solution which allows us to process our documents with promptness and remarkable flexibility. As a technological company, we appreciate real IT professionals. Comarch is certainly one to recommend."