Aug 7, 2026
Case Study
A national building-materials retailer lifted accounts payable automation from a 55% baseline to 75%, and now processes 33,000 transactions a month through AI.
A national building-materials group runs accounts payable across a large, fragmented supplier base. Many of its suppliers are established EDI trading partners. Many more are not — smaller merchants and regional suppliers who send invoices as PDFs, or on paper.
That split is the reason most AP automation programmes stall. Traditional EDI handles the largest suppliers well, and then the long tail is left to people with keyboards.
Before deploying Missing Link, the group had reached 55% automation using existing EDI and portal solutions. The remaining 45% was manual: documents that arrived in formats no integration could read, matched by hand against purchase orders and goods received notes.
The constraint was not effort. It was that the automation available to them only worked for suppliers who were already digital.
Missing Link applies AI-powered document capture to the suppliers that EDI cannot reach. Invoices arriving as PDFs or scans are read, validated, matched three ways against the purchase order and goods received note, and posted — without a person re-keying them.
Critically, this did not require the group's smaller suppliers to change how they invoice.
The supplier number is the one worth pausing on. Automation rates can be improved by concentrating on a handful of high-volume trading partners. Growing the number of suppliers trading digitally by 62% is a different achievement: it means the long tail moved, not just the top.
Every percentage point of AP automation is manual handling removed, fewer invoice disputes, faster supplier payment, and cleaner data arriving in the ERP. But the strategic result is broader. A supplier who transacts digitally once becomes a supplier with a trading history — and a trading history is the foundation of a trusted supplier profile.
Bridging the gap between traditional EDI and full digital automation is not only an efficiency exercise. It is how a supplier base becomes a network.
Published anonymously. Figures are shown as relative change.
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