See how Imperial Dade unlocks millions in early payment discounts and cuts invoice processing time by 90%.
About Imperial Dade
Founded in 1935, Imperial Dade is North America’s premier distributor of foodservice packaging, janitorial equipment, and industrial supplies. The company has grown rapidly through acquisitions and now supports 120,000+ customers across 100+ locations, with a portfolio of 100,000+ SKUs.
Paperless ≠ Automation
The AP process at Imperial Dade involved several non-integrated solutions and several manual touchpoints, resulting in work duplication and a 7-10-day invoice processing time. Manual processes resulted in processing errors, and dirty data was entering their core ERP and BSM platform.
Lastly, Imperial Dade could not capture early payment discounts or prevent duplicate payments.
“Before Rossum, we had three different groups, and each group was touching the same invoice, doing the same work every single time. It was taking seven to ten days to process an invoice, and on a busy Monday, we could be slammed with hundreds of invoices from the weekend alone.”
Allison Stone, AP Manager
Business objective: maximize automation & discounts
Imperial Dade set out to streamline its Accounts Payable operations, aiming to support its rapid expansion and acquisition-driven growth with scalable automation.
“AP is always first to integrate acquisitions – we needed a solution that could handle any ERP system from day one.”
Allison Stone, AP Manager
Their objectives were to:
- Establish end-to-end AP automation: processing of PO and non-PO invoices, dropship invoices, credits memos, and bills of lading, as well as validations against business rules.
- Capture early payment discounts.
- Implement automated tiered approval workflows.
- Ensure on-time payments.
“The previous tool was supposed to deliver more automation, but all it did was make us paperless. We needed start-to-finish automation, not just less paper. What really pushed us was the loss of early payment discounts—we were hearing about it from the highest levels, and we knew something had to change.”
Allison Stone, AP Manager
The solution: rapid two-stream implementation
To deal with the complexity of Imperial Dade’s distribution business, the implementation was broken down into two main streams:
- The Subsidiaries implementation with their legacy ERP systems
- The HQ implementation with their core ERP as the target system
Subsidiaries implementation
For the subsidiaries, Rossum was first deployed to handle invoice processing for all acquired companies still operating on their original ERPs. This approach allowed Imperial Dade to rapidly integrate new acquisitions, regardless of their existing technology stack, and provide immediate automation benefits.
“With Rossum, we’ve been able to create business rules and thresholds, eliminating so many manual steps and created much more straight-through processing.”
Joanna Giangrande, Director of Accounts Payable
HQ implementation
At HQ, with their core ERP, the implementation focused on delivering advanced automation and standardization, covering:
- Document ingestion & pre-processing: Rossum removes spam, duplicates, splits documents, classifies them and routes to an appropriate workspace, for example, invoices and credit notes are processed by a separate logic.
- Data extraction & manipulation: this stage includes GL coding, tax coding, vendor & PO vendor, detecting early payment discounts, and specific business logic.
- Collaboration & communication: Imperial Dade use Rossum’s email autoreply functionality to reject invoices as well as approval workflows.
Some of the specific business rules for Imperial Dade’s AP process include:
- Set percentage price discrepancy tolerance against the PO to maximize straight-through processing
- Automated selection of the most advantageous payment terms to maximize early payment discounts.
All of the automated processing logic lets the Imperial Dade AP team process invoices in just 1 day.
“Now, if we have a late invoice that needs to be paid, we can push it through today and have it ready for payment that afternoon. That’s one of my top three favorite features—the turnaround is so quick and efficient.”
Allison Stone, AP Manager
Results
With 31 subsidiaries going live in 4 months and the HQ going live in 6 months, Imperial Dade have seen impressive results within several weeks:
- 60% reduction in missed early payment discounts: estimated savings in the millions per year.
- 96%+ average data extraction accuracy and just 19-second review time for invoices that need validation.
The future
The AP team is working on increasing the share of touchless invoices through GL coding powered by Rossum AI agents, as well as implementing new use cases such as processing remittances and order acknowledgements.
