One of Australia’s largest retailers, Chemist Warehouse receives thousands of supplier invoices daily. The discount pharmaceutical company implemented accounts payable automation in 2016 to ensure that invoices were paid correctly and on time. The efficiencies from this business practice have allowed Chemist Warehouse to scale and grow year on year and maximize supplier discounts. Chemist Warehouse sought help from ACMO to stabilize their Tungsten TotalAgility Platform which was experiencing application instability and reaching the end of its version support from Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax. ACMO was tasked with resolving the exponential amount of invoice exception failures that were occurring, improving the overall system performance, and upgrading from Tungsten TotalAgility v7.3 to v7.7.

About Chemist Warehouse

Chemist Warehouse Group is an Australian business operating a chain of retail pharmacies, proudly owned and operated by Australian registered pharmacists. The company has grown from a single shop in the outer Northern suburbs of Melbourne and is now Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer with over 550 stores and employs over 15,000 staff. The company brands itself as offering discounted prices for pharmaceutical goods. Chemist Warehouse trades in all states and territories and serves over 1.5 million customers and dispenses 1 million+ prescriptions a week.

About ACMO

Based in Sydney, ACMO helps enterprises streamline and simplify their business processes using Intelligent Automation solutions. ACMO is a Silver Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax Partner in Australia with the technical consulting team having over 30 years of combined Tungsten Automation, formerly Kofax product suite experience. The award-winning company designs and delivers comprehensive automation solutions and provides ongoing support and maintenance to customers all over Australia and New Zealand.

The Solution

The ACMO Service team utilised their proprietary health-check template to identify performance bottlenecks and create a plan to stabilise and upgrade the platform with minimum disruption. The agile development practices helped the team to handle changing priorities and action items that were important to the customer. The system upgrade involved setting up a non-production environment, API updates, and end-to-end integration testing to ensure all went well in production. New processes and workflows were introduced to perform routine housekeeping, handle exceptions proactively, and automatically communicate any issues that require attention.

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The Results

Chemist Warehouse can now process their 20,000+ invoices a day using a stable, fast, and efficient system. By addressing the exception workflow and the manual error rate monitoring, Chemist Warehouse is now confident for on-time supplier payments.

“We’ve succeeded in accelerating our invoice approval process and can keep in line with the amount of processing needed from the rapid expanse of all our new retail stores. Based on the success and expert support from ACMO, we can confidently look at expanding automation to other parts of the business”, explains Mark Finocchiaro Managing Partner and Director of Chemist Warehouse. “The upgrade and new automation workflows will allow us to stay ahead of the competition. It has given us a 90% reduction in errors, improved performance, cost savings, and enhanced productivity.”

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