The company's businesses focus on magazine papers, newsprint, fine and specialty papers, converting materials and wood products. The company has approximately 100 production operations in 15 countries and an extensive sales network comprising over 170 sales and distribution companies worldwide. UPM's sales in 2005 were EUR 9.3 billion and the group employs approximately 31,000 people.
In 2001 UPM began a project to streamline its current purchase invoice process with the target of speeding up the process of managing supplier invoices, minimizing the internal time involved by its Accounts Payable staff and enabling the centralizing of the entire invoice handling process. A key objective was to enable UPM’s suppliers to provide all invoices in electronic format and manage those invoices and the associated documents in a secure central electronic archive.
UPM chose Rondo from SoftCo’s Nordic partner WM-Data. Initially Rondo was implemented in the different regional units to handle their own purchase invoices. The process has now been centralized to a number of key locations as part of UPM’s target to improve efficiency and benefit from economies of scale.
To date Rondo has been implemented in paper mills in France, UK and throughout Finland. Roll-out projects in North America (USA, Canada) and Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy) are currently in progress. In UPM, Rondo has become the second most used application with more than 5,000 users and has significantly improved the efficiency of the whole purchase invoice process.
Rondo streamlines the AP process for UPM by converting paper invoices into digital images, extracting key data to enhance approval processing, archiving them in a secure Web-based repository, performing 3 way matches of documents, routing the invoices for approval and integrating seamlessly with UPM’s line of business applications. Rondo manages both invoices with and without purchases orders. Non PO invoices are posted and then routed for verification and approval using the intuitive Rondo Web application which is available throughout UPM via its corporate Intranet.
Supplier invoices which have an associated purchase order are automatically matched in Rondo. Rondo is integrated with UPM’s Materials Management systems where three-way matching of order-receipt-invoice is undertaken. If three-way matching occurs the invoice is sent directly to the UPM financial system to be paid. Where there is a mismatch the invoice is routed via Rondo to the appropriate approver. Finally all Invoices and there associated data and documentation are archived in Rondo allowing all users immediate online access to their own invoices, removing the need to print copy invoices.
UPM-Kymmene