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Real-time Billing Boosts Supplier Relations at a Major Colombian Airline

If you want to elevate your travel experience to new heights, our client is just what you need.

One of Colombia's top airlines - with 16,000+ employees and 200+ aircraft, flies you to 100+ destinations in 26 countries across the Americas and Europe - recently joined forces with Avvale to streamline billing and improve supplier relations, offering real-time billing updates.

The Challenge

Two years ago, our client decided to enhance its invoice management system by implementing SAP Vendor Invoice Management by OpenText. While collaborating with Avvale to adopt this solution, the company identified a crucial opportunity to streamline their invoicing procedures, aiming to automate manual tasks and improve internal efficiency by integrating their various existing systems.
 
Improving supplier relationships to facilitate real-time billing status would lead to substantial improvements in internal efficiency within the accounts payable process. Integrating the FUEL and FLIGHT ORDER booths with SAP Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) was the key solution. It would streamline the entire billing process, reduce the risk of manual errors, and provide control over the process by allowing constant monitoring of invoice statuses in the SAP VIM solution.
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The Approach

Avvale's integration expertise allowed the development of three critical processes to automate tasks:

  • ARIBA Network and SAP VIM Integration, which encompassed two essential phases:
    • Inbound: SAP VIM was integrated to receive ARIBA Network invoices, creating a new reception channel.
    • Outbound: Automatic invoice status updates were sent to the ARIBA Network for easy access and reference.
  • Integration with FUEL to automate the transmission of legal invoice data and initiate the corresponding process within the FUEL cockpit.
  • Integration with FLIGHT ORDER to automatically transmit legal invoice data and start the process within the FLIGHT ORDER cockpit.

Given the complexity of the process, we applied a tailored logic to determine the status of VIM invoices sent exclusively via ARIBA. Additionally, since invoices arrive from various channels and utilize an IDOC for IATA, we customized OpenText's standard logic to align invoice statuses between VIM and ARIBA, tailored to their business needs. Also, the legal number of the invoice was adjusted, and stored in a non-standard field. This development was exclusively designed and implemented to meet the company's unique requirements.

This unlocked the transfer of data between systems, promoting risk reduction, better control, monitoring, and internal management.

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The Impact

Thanks to Avvale's support in system integration, the company significantly improved its time efficiency and internal management activities. Additionally, the client enhanced its strategy for disseminating functionalities to its suppliers, enabling them to access real-time updates on their invoicing processes through the integrated VIM-ARIBA system. The manual data transfer process from VIM to FUEL, a specialized fuel invoice processing system, was completely eliminated. This eliminated the risk of entering erroneous data, streamlined processing times, and ensured that both systems remained synchronized in terms of invoice status. Consequently, VIM reports now accurately reflect and consolidate invoicing status in FUEL.

Similarly, the manual data transfer process from VIM to FLIGHT ORDER, a system handling invoicing generated by flight orders, has been eradicated. This reduction in manual data handling not only mitigates associated risks but also optimizes processing times and consolidates invoicing status reports generated by VIM.

Furthermore, the implementation of new functionalities has optimized internal control and management of invoicing processes, thereby preventing potential duplications that could arise from multiple reception channels.

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