Founded in 1861 as a sugar brokerage firm, Czarnikow is a global supply chain solutions provider within the agri products, food ingredients and packaging, and energy industries. The company sources, trades, moves and de-risks commodities through a range of services including physical and derivatives trading, financing, consulting, and freight and logistics management.
But one area of their operations wasn’t sugar-sweet: Their 16 global offices were wasting hours on manual invoice processing.
Highly skilled employees were tied up poring over documentation from more than 350 product and freight vendors. And they were rekeying data instead of focusing on business growth. The inconsistent processes increased the risks of duplicate or fraudulent remittances. This inefficiency delayed payments and even resulted in missed or inaccurate disbursements, negatively affecting critical vendor relationships.
The need for a solution to allow them to scale and support their growing business was evident.
"We had invoices coming in from different business units and different vendors, all relying on timely payment. There was too much manual work slowing everybody down and tying up skilled employees. We knew we had to automate."