How Thorlux scaled shared services AP with Infor M3 and automation
Thorlux, part of F.W. Thorpe plc, adopted Medius to modernize accounts payable and improve its shared services center on Infor M3. Previously using manual invoice handling, the team streamlined workflows by integrating AP automation with its ERP.
In this video, Michelle Hammersley, finance director, shares how Thorlux achieved 57% touchless processing for purchase-order invoices and 61% for non-purchase-order invoices. With better invoice visibility, automated query handling, and centralized control, Medius helps Thorlux run a more efficient, scalable shared services model.
My name is Michelle Hammersley. I am the finance director for Thorlux, which is part of F. W. Thorpe Plc.
F. W. Thorpe is one of the UK's biggest lighting manufacturers, but we don't just design lights, manufacture them in the UK. We also provide smart lighting systems for hospitals, universities, industrial applications.
We employ over eight hundred people across all of our companies, Thorlux is about half of the business. We have two main sites, manufacturing in Redditch in Worcestershire and an organization in Ireland.
We're operating [Infor] M3 as our ERP system, and we also operate a shared service center in Redditch for our subsidiaries.
And that's why we were looking to go into Medius for our accounts payable journey so that we could develop that shared service center.
We have been processing invoices in a very manual way in Thorlux for a very long time. We've been used to taking those invoices in, scanning them in, writing everything down on bits of paper, putting it all into the system, and it was just generally an extremely manual process.
Since we've been using Medius, we found that that process has become much more streamlined. We've got perhaps fifty seven percent of our purchase order invoices touchless, sixty one percent of our non purchase order invoices touchless. We've been able to identify some of the issues with some of the suppliers. We've been able to automate some of that query processing. We've got a much greater visibility now of where invoices are in the system, whom they're with, what the bottlenecks are, and it effectively gives us a much greater insight into our accounts payable ledgers so that we can spend our time dealing effectively with suppliers and dealing effectively with the issues that arise.
Now that we've actually got every single invoice across those two entities flowing into Medius, which incidentally was a process that happened relatively quickly, the feedback has been really positive. People find that it's transparent, it's easy to use. With a little bit of training, we can get people doing the right things. The feedback has been that we can see much better where everything is and that, actually, we have a much smoother journey and better communication between departments because those departments are both talking about the same documents in the same place with the same visibility at the same time.
So I don't think anybody would want to go back to the old ways even if initially that's what they said that they would like to do.
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