KnowledgeLake's 2021 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY: Best Achievement in Process Automation

New Belgium Brewing (NBB) is famous for brews such as Fat Tire, Citradelic, and Voodoo Ranger IPA. When annual production approached a million barrels, NBB built an additional facility. They chose the KnowledgeLake intelligent document processing solution to address business process challenges and help them scale operations to a national level.

NBB traditionally relied on paper documents and manual processes for organizing and storing content. Employees spent a great deal of time searching for needed information. Employees had to rifle through filing cabinets, storage boxes, and stacks of paper searching for documents. This unstructured process was challenging to maintain, time-consuming, and tedious.

NBB integrated KnowledgeLake into its existing Microsoft SharePoint deployment to enable employees to easily capture and digitize paper documents and automatically categorize and store them in a centralized repository. The cloud-native platform combines intelligent document capture and robotic process automation (RPA) to help NBB convert data into valuable information, modernize processes, and drive strategic growth.

Leveraging KnowledgeLake to index organizational content has allowed employees to locate essential information quickly. This rapid search experience has also boosted productivity and facilitated a smoother and more efficient auditing process.

In a short period of time, NBB reduced its invoice processing time by 74%. Within months, the cost to process a document dropped 69%. Their average annual return on investment is 430%, a total savings of $1,092,028 over three years.

Quick and Easy Deployment of Cloud Automation Platform

The configuration and set-up of KnowledgeLake took two weeks to push live. This included setting up nearly 600 different vendors (invoice types) to be automatically classified and have data extracted. A business-critical workflow (invoice processing) that used to be performed manually now operates in an automated manner with minimal end-user interaction.

Cloud Automation Delivers A Strong ROI – Let’s Drink to That!

New Belgium Brewing’s adoption of the KnowledgeLake Platform has enabled them to automate capturing, processing, and managing their most important transactional documents in a single cloud-based platform. KnowledgeLake is now being used by the brewery’s AP/AR Finance, Environmental Health and Safety, and Human Resources departments, with plans for deployment in additional departments.

NBB has benefitted from revitalized financial operations since deploying KnowledgeLake. For example, NBB was lucky to get 5-10% of their invoices into MSFT Dynamics without manual intervention prior to KnowledgeLake. Now, they’re getting almost 100% of invoices into the system without any manual intervention.

Within the first two weeks of deployment, KnowledgeLake’s machine learning technology reduced the brewery’s invoice processing time by 74% (from 38 seconds to 10 seconds), and 85% of their invoices are now processed straight through. These automated AP/AR workflows have resulted in faster approvals and payments to vendors and distributors, expediting a formerly time-consuming, business-critical process.

New Belgium Brewing quickly experienced a substantial financial return on its investment in KnowledgeLake. Within months, the cost to process a document dropped 69%, from $3.58 per document to $1.11. Their average annual return on investment is 430%, which equates to a total savings of $1,092,028 over three years.