Transforming Accounts Payable for a Global Education Leader

The client is a multinational publishing and education company with a footprint spanning over 70 countries worldwide. As a global leader in learning and education, the organization delivers a broad portfolio of academic content, digital learning solutions, and curriculum-aligned materials to schools, universities, and professionals.

The Challenge: Finance Under Operational Stress

As the publishing giant expanded its reach across 70+ countries, so did its network of vendors and suppliers. With over 250,000 invoices to process annually, the Accounts Payable (AP) team was drowning in paperwork. Each invoice had to be manually received, verified, routed, approved, and recorded—an exhaustive cycle repeated hundreds of times each day.

This legacy, paper-based process strained the team’s productivity and became a serious cost driver. Errors due to misplacement of invoices, time-consuming exception handling, and delayed approvals started compounding. Vendor relationships began to suffer, and so did internal confidence in the finance function's ability to scale with the business.

The inefficiencies were no longer just an operational issue—they had become a strategic concern. Senior leadership, including the CFO and Head of Global Finance Operations, recognized that the manual AP process was eroding both agility and compliance. With growing pressure to reduce operational costs and increase visibility into spend, the leadership team knew that automation wasn’t just an option—it was an urgent necessity.

The Solution: End-to-End AP Automation

To address the client's growing operational burden, Datamatics proposed a comprehensive, end-to-end Business Process Management (BPM) solution designed to overhaul and streamline the Accounts Payable function. At the heart of the solution was a centralized operations model, ensuring uniformity, speed, and control across the entire AP lifecycle.

Datamatics took complete ownership—from mailroom operations to check printing and payment register posting, delivering a unified service layer that minimized fragmentation and manual touchpoints. By consolidating scanning and back-end printing operations, Datamatics enabled the client to benefit from economies of scale—a critical factor in driving down per-invoice processing costs.

To eliminate delays and inefficiencies, the solution included automated exception handling powered by a built-in escalation mechanism. A dedicated helpdesk facility ensured that anomalies were resolved swiftly, keeping the approval chain unblocked and the financial pipeline moving.