Sector
Property & Facilities Management
Assets Under Management
£13.7 billion
Floor Space Managed
22.8 million sq ft
Internal Purchasing Staff
400+
Customer Since
2016
How Proactis Helped
“We wanted to move towards a solution where we could benefit from a professional, innovative, software developer with a long history of development expertise. We know that with Proactis the solution will move with the times.”
Jonty McNuff, Head of Business Transformation, British Land
Delivered full visibility of purchase commitments and invoices flowing through the business at any point in time
Enabled every invoice to be tracked back to its initial commitment, eliminating the previously time-consuming reconciliation process
Introduced consistent, organisation-wide purchase order and invoice processing for the first time
Processed over 10,000 purchase orders and 25,000 invoices through the system within just over a year of implementation
Improved financial reporting accuracy, replacing a largely manual quarterly commitment exercise with real-time data
Provided new levels of automation, control, and transparency through OCR-powered invoice data capture
Enabled controlled employee expense reimbursements through the Proactis Expenses module
Established a scalable platform supporting planned expansion of Proactis P2P into British Land's property management operations
Overview
British Land is one of the UK's largest property development and investment companies, listed on the FTSE 100 and managing £13.7 billion of assets across 22.8 million square feet of floor space. Having already adopted Proactis Source-to-Contract to modernise its procurement processes, British Land extended its partnership to include Procure-to-Pay and Invoice Capture - transforming the visibility and consistency of its purchase order and invoice management. Within just over a year, over 10,000 purchase orders and 25,000 invoices had been processed through the system.
Challenge
The British Land Company plc is one of the largest property development and investment companies in the UK, a constituent of the FTSE 100, and a founding member of the European Public Real Estate Association. Over 400 internal staff and 50 external project managers are responsible for purchasing activity across the business.
Despite its scale, British Land's electronic purchase orders were not managed consistently across the business. Invoices frequently arrived with no clear link to an initial commitment, making it time-consuming to trace what the spend related to - a problem compounded by natural staff turnover. Gaining an accurate picture of financial commitments at any given point was largely a manual, quarterly exercise.
Having already embarked on a digital transformation through the adoption of Proactis Source-to-Contract, British Land identified the opportunity to automate its Procure-to-Pay and Accounts Payable processes to close these gaps in visibility and consistency.
Solution
Following a procurement process involving functional reviews and workshops with stakeholders across the business, Proactis was confirmed as the appropriate fit - extending the existing Source-to-Contract relationship into Purchase-to-Pay and Invoice Capture.
Proactis P2P delivered significantly greater visibility of the purchasing process, enabling British Land to manage purchase order processing more efficiently with greater functionality and flexibility. Proactis Invoice Capture was also implemented to streamline invoicing, using optical character recognition (OCR) to automate data extraction and deliver new levels of control, transparency, and reporting accuracy.
During implementation, British Land identified the additional opportunity to deploy the Proactis Expenses module to manage controlled employee reimbursements - further expanding the scope of the partnership and delivering additional process efficiencies.
“We've always been a pretty good payer of invoices. But we now have far better visibility of our commitments and invoices coming through the company. When invoices arrive, we can now track them back to initial commitment to spend. Each invoice is visible and the whole process is consistent across the business.”
Jonty McNuff, Head of Business Transformation, British Land
About us
Proactis has worked with finance and procurement teams for 30 years. We know what the problems look like - and what it takes to fix them.
Partners
We work with a network of trusted ERP partners who help you get Proactis running alongside your existing systems - and make sure it keeps working as your organisation evolves.
Customers
From day one through to long-term use, our team works alongside yours to make sure you get real value from the platform - not just a successful go-live.
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