Automating Procure-to-Pay for More Than 18,000 Purchase Orders at a Telecoms Field-Services Company

The challenge

Purchasing ran across many sites, departments and regions. Supplier quotes arrived as PDF attachments, requisitions were approved in email threads, purchase orders lived in the ERP, delivery notes were signed on site, and invoices were matched to orders by hand. Nobody could say, for a given invoice, whether the quantity had been received, whether the price matched the order, or who had approved the original spend. Contractor onboarding added a second problem: specialist contractors needed four sequential departmental approvals — finance, health and safety, technical and legal — and submitted more than 25 compliance documents each, all tracked in inboxes. Credentials approved early in the year could lapse months later without anyone noticing until a contractor was turned away at the gate.

The approach

Docwize was configured as the governed front end to the ERP rather than a replacement for it. Each stage of the cycle became a structured record with typed custom fields, and workflow nodes called the ERP's API at the points where the ERP needed to assign its own reference numbers. The ERP remained the financial system of record; Docwize held the documents, the approvals and the matching logic.

• •Extract quote header, line items and capture fields (site, location, department, supplier, project) from uploaded quote PDFs using an AI extraction template, and check that extracted line items balance to the quote total before a requisition can be raised
• •Route each purchase requisition through an approval workflow whose approvers are selected by a rules table on amount, location and division — up to five sequential approver levels — with the ERP requisition number written back to the record
• •Sync approved purchase orders and their line items from the ERP into custom field grids so that every order line is a queryable row
• •Capture delivery notes on site, post goods receipts to the ERP through an API node, and store the returned receipt reference against each received line
• •Ingest supplier invoices, link invoice lines to purchase order lines with GridLink, and run a three-way match of invoiced quantity and unit price against ordered and receipted values, blocking exceptions before the approval workflow
• •Onboard vendors through a four-gate workflow that creates the vendor in the ERP as inactive when finance approves and activates it only once the legal gate's generated agreements have been digitally signed by all parties