Commercial doubles order processing capacity and processes 30% more invoices daily

Commercial: a fast-growing business transformation challenger

Commercial are UK-based business transformation specialists who enable the best organizations to become better through comprehensive workplace technology, supplies, and services. The company operates as both a distributor and service provider across multiple business-critical areas, growing by 11% a year.

“As a manager, I’m looking to control costs and not add additional spend where I don’t need to. I want to keep the team the size it is, and look at our processes and systems to make sure we’re using the right thing, we’re doing the right thing, and making each process as efficient as possible.”
Catherine Chilton, Purchasing Manager, Commercial

The challenge: legacy OCR slows down invoice and order processing

Commercial were dealing with document processing bottlenecks on both the Accounts Payable and the Account Management sides.

Template-based invoice processing brings errors and payment delays

The Accounts Payable team receives approximately 10,000 invoices from 1,000 suppliers monthly.

In the past, templates in the OCR solution were difficult to set up and maintain, requiring constant IT support. The previous solution captured incorrect data that pushed wrong information downstream, so each invoice required 4 minutes of work and up to 20 corrections before entering the ERP system.

It was painful and frustrating for the AP team.

Customer order processing was slow and error-prone

The customer order management team faced similar struggles processing approximately 2,000 customer orders every month. Each order took account managers approximately twenty minutes to create manually, line-by-line, in their ERP system.

This approach caused errors and delays in order processing and delivery.

Business objective: establish scalable automation to support business-critical processes

As a B2B supplier, Commercial is a critical link in the supply chain for products not intended for resale.

Fast and accurate processing of both invoices and sales orders is critical for their business success.

With ambitious revenue targets, Commercial needed a scalable, intelligent document processing solution to support their expanding operations.

“What impressed us about Rossum was the modern approach and agility to move quickly when business needs arose—no document templates are required. The interface is super user-friendly, and lots of integrations are available. Lastly, I see that Rossum and Commercial are aligned for the long-term.”
Catherine Chilton, Purchasing Manager, Commercial

Solution: scalable document processing platform

The implementation started on April 15, 2025, and took just 8 weeks to complete.

Commercial implemented a dual-queue architecture with separate email inboxes for Accounts Payable and Customer Order Processing, ensuring proper document routing to the appropriate teams.

Rossum is especially helpful with:

• Blocking duplicate invoices and sales orders
• Automatically transforming data on historically challenging invoices
• Processing orders in foreign languages.
• Proving an audit trail to track every step of document processing

After processing, all data moves to Commercial’s custom ERP system.

Feature highlight: Formula Fields

The Commercial teams highlighted the Formula Fields feature as being especially useful.

For customer orders, Commercial implemented an intelligent duplicate detection system when clients resubmit orders with updated costs. The Formula Field rule identifies the duplicate and pauses processing to prevent double-entry into the ERP. This is then flagged to the Account Manager to update the original sales order and reject the duplicate version.

With invoices, the Accounts Payable team sometimes receives invoices from a specific supplier that provides quantity, net unit cost, and gross total on the same line. They have configured an automated data transformation that calculates the correct base net cost and disregards the captured gross amount, ensuring accurate data flows into the ERP.

Results: empowered AP and account management  teams

Using Rossum for invoice and order processing, Commercial have achieved substantial operational benefits:

Accounts Payable

• Processing time reduced from 4 minutes to 34 seconds per invoice, enabling the AP team to pay 30-40% more invoices every day.
• Corrections per invoice dropped from 20 to 0.78 per invoice.
• Full visibility into document processing with statistics now available.

“Instead of general data entry, my team can now deal with exceptions and resolve them as fast as possible so that we can pay our suppliers on time every time.”
Catherine Chilton, Purchasing Manager, Commercial

Customer Orders

• 70% of customer orders are touchless, with processing times reduced from 5 minutes to 28 seconds per order.
• Customer order processing capacity increased from 1,000 to 2,000 orders monthly.
• Corrections per customer order dropped to 0.48 per order.

“70% of our customer orders are now processed without any manual intervention. Having all that time back is a game-changer for our account management team.”
Catherine Chilton, Purchasing Manager, Commercial

Future expansion plans

Commercial plans to maximize their Rossum investment through automation improvements, error reduction, and new use cases.

The Rossum implementation positions Commercial to achieve their ambitious growth targets while maintaining operational efficiency and service quality standards.

“This was a really fun project to work on. We really enjoyed it. Everything was seamless and easy.”
Catherine Chilton, Purchasing Manager, Commercial