About the Client
AIB is a financial services group operating predominantly in the Republic of Ireland and the UK with a presence in the United States.
AIB’s business has been restructured in recent years with the aim of becoming a customer focused, profitable and lower risk institution, well positioned to support economic recovery in Ireland while seeking to generate sustainable shareholder returns.
Challenges
AIB needed a procurement solution that would simplify the purchasing process, submission of expenses, ordering goods and services and obtaining refunds, as well as freeing up staff time to serve customers.
Although the previous P2P solution had been available at Office locations, a new system was needed that would be extended across the entire network, including branches, to a total of approximately 7,500 users.
At AIB all users are entitled to claim expenses. There are c. 2,500 company credit card holders and out-of-pocket expense users who would use the system on an ad hoc basis.
Brenda Robinson, Head of Accounts Payable and Coupa Sustainment Team for AIB says, “Our objective was to create a paperless expenses system, allowing us to invoice electronically. Although we already had an automated expenses system it still generated paper in the form of printed expense reports; these reports had to be sent to a central location in a pre-printed dedicated coloured envelope”.
The Solution
Working with AIB since 2007, Xoomworks Procurement was selected as its implementation partner to support AIB in the replacement of their P2P platform with Coupa.
Brenda explains, “Coupa presented us with significant benefits, including the advantages of no supplier costs; Coupa is easy-to-use and also offered us options in terms of invoice delivery. Xoomworks, having the knowledge and experience to deliver Coupa for us, were selected as our implementation partner.”
The scope of the Coupa project covered all aspects including sourcing, procurement, invoicing, expenses and P2P and full integration with the existing SAP ERP system. As Brenda asserts, “Part of our business requirement was a single source of real-time truth for all our data.”
One of AIB’s core requirements was to have a fully automated expenses system.
“It is a notable achievement to go from c.56,000 expense claim envelopes per annum to paperless overnight, that is exactly what was achieved.”
What’s Next?
Nine months into the Coupa implementation and AIB is already seeing the benefits. There is a constant drive to ensure that they get the maximum from their Coupa investment.
The next step is to explore the potential to use Xoomworks’ optimisation service XoomTune which is aimed at helping companies to capture savings, improve efficiency and gain control.
Download the client story to learn more.
