5 Tips to Enhance Your VIM Reporting and Drive Better Procure-to-Pay Results

Automating your vendor invoice management processes with SAP Invoice Management by OpenText (VIM) can significantly improve efficiency. However, out-of-the-box, VIM provides minimal standard reports and only raw data exports with limited insights. This leaves Accounts Payable (AP) teams struggling to uncover inefficiencies and optimize processes, forcing them to rely on time-consuming manual data analysis.

The Challenges of Manual Data Analysis

For many organizations, the limitations of standard VIM reporting force advanced data analysts to spend significant time manually extracting, normalizing, organizing, and analyzing raw data to answer critical questions:

• What is our overall Accounts Payable performance?
• Can we reliably measure our KPIs?
• Does our IDOC channel deliver a touchless process?
• Is our average cost of processing an invoice higher than industry benchmarks?
• Do we pay suppliers on time? If not, why?
• Which vendors’ invoices require special attention, and why?
• Is our invoicing process transparent to all stakeholders?
• What fields does our VIM scanning solution structurally miss?
• Where should we focus VIM’s training efforts?

This process is not only time-consuming but also repetitive. Furthermore, most standard reports are designed to compare specific values, not provide an overarching view of system functionality. This lack of flexibility makes it difficult to identify hidden inefficiencies, leaving AP teams with little time to focus on meaningful analysis and action.

Actionable Tips to Enhance VIM Reporting

To help you overcome these challenges, here are five actionable tips to enhance your VIM reporting and drive better results for your Procure-to-Pay (P2P) processes:

1. Define and Track Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
   Ensure your AP team is aligned on which KPIs to track, such as touchless invoice processing rates, average invoice approval times, and cost per invoice. Regularly reviewing these metrics can highlight trends and inefficiencies.
2. Leverage Data Visualization Tools
   Invest in tools that convert raw data into actionable dashboards and charts. Visualizing data makes it easier to identify patterns and bottlenecks, enabling your team to take quicker action.
3. Standardize Reporting Templates
   Create templates for consistent reporting across teams. Standardization ensures everyone is reviewing the same data and eliminates redundant reporting efforts.
4. Integrate AP Data Across Systems
   Streamline data flow between your invoice management system, ERP, and reporting tools. Integration reduces data silos and improves reporting accuracy and completeness.
5. Adopt Advanced Analytics Solutions
   Upgrade to a solution like Optima’s Insights and Analytics package to automate data extraction, normalization, and reporting. This eliminates time spent on repetitive tasks and frees your team to focus on improving processes.

The Solution: Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics

If you’re managing Accounts Payable with VIM, you don’t have to settle for standard reports. Optima’s Insights and Analytics package is a cost-effective way to easily extract the necessary data and assemble it into understandable, process-focused dashboards, reports and recommendations. This allows your team to focus on determining actionable insights instead of wasting time manipulating data tables.

Optima’s Executive Insights and Analytics package is asolution that delivers:

Pre-Configured Dashboards and KPI’s: Presents a “helicopter view” of your vendor invoices throughout your AP processes. It can visually slice and dice endlessly into company codes, vendor account groups, types of invoices, document dates, channels and more.

Standard Dashboard Views

From day one, you get a complete view of the end-to-end invoice life cycle organized into specific areas to help you monitor your procure-to-pay processes and identify what is working well, as well as any issues or bottlenecks. The standard dashboards are:

• Vendor Invoice Overview
• Invoice Payment Analysis
• Date Analysis
• Waste Analysis
• Exception Analysis
• Vendor Analysis
• OCR Performance