Open Text™ Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced today that SAP will resell Open Text Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) under the name the SAP® Invoice Management application by Open Text.  As part of this agreement, SAP will also resell Open Text’s document capture solution Invoice Capture Center, from Open Text’s recent acquisition of Captaris, under the name optical character recognition (OCR) option for SAP Invoice Management. Today’s announcement builds on the reseller agreement signed by the two companies last year and demonstrates continued evidence of SAP’s ecosystem strategy to deliver additional choice and flexibility to customers looking to extend the value of their SAP investments.

Applications Optimise Entire Financial Supply Chain

Processing paper invoices, which requires substantial manual effort for data entry to financial applications, represents a major challenge for customers to manage the volume of invoices, ensure timely payment and keep costs under control. Large corporations process millions of invoices per year, of which usually more than 80 percent are still paper-based. Although invoice exceptions represent a small percentage of this volume, they account for the majority of processing time.

Available today, SAP Invoice Management will be targeted to all industries and organisations interested in increased control and efficiency of their invoice-to-pay cycle. Organisations already using VIM, including many Fortune 1000 companies, experience significant benefits, such as dramatically lower cost-per-invoice, improved on-time payment performance, drastically improved ability to leverage cash discounts, automated internal financial controls, reduced duplicate invoices and payments, improved ratings by suppliers and, as a result, greater leverage in negotiating beneficial terms and pricing. SAP Invoice Management completes the portfolio of finance solutions for SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, SAP® ERP, enabling companies to optimise their entire financial supply chain.

The OCR option for SAP Invoice Management is scheduled to be available in early 2009. The document-capture capabilities allow organisations to convert paper invoices into electronic form so they can be processed electronically at a lower cost.

“Open Text continues to demonstrate its importance as an SAP partner, adding value with its proven experience in enhancing document processing solutions,” said Tom Roberts, global vice president, Global Software and Technology Partners, SAP. “By working together and expanding our reseller agreement to include invoice management, we are able to assist customers in transforming their finance functions in an efficient, more holistic manner.”  

“Organisations worldwide run critical business operations on SAP solutions,” said John Wilkerson, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services and Support, Open Text. “Through our reseller agreement, we’re providing combined solutions that offer the kind of bottom-line value that’s essential in a tightening economy. We benefit from a long history of experience working with SAP to deliver these solutions, and look forward to continuing the success we’ve seen so far in our work with SAP.”

Open Text is an industry leader in ECM solutions for use with SAP solutions, leveraging two decades of partnership and co-development, and expertise gained from delivering solutions to more than 2,700 SAP customer sites around the world. Open Text’s well-established products offer a complete range of capabilities for managing and archiving business documents - incoming and outgoing invoices, orders, delivery notes, quality certificates, human resources documents - that originate from customers’ SAP applications. Open Text’s applications for use with SAP software help customers improve efficiency in key processes, manage compliance, consolidate IT systems and reduce costs. Open Text is an SAP software solution partner with products that have achieved SAP Certified Integration status. Because of the strategic relationship between Open Text and SAP in regards to ECM, SAP also resells Open Text products in this space.

To learn more about SAP Invoice Management by Open Text and Open Text’s ECM applications for use with SAP software such as the SAP® Archiving application by Open Text and the SAP® Document Access application by Open Text, please visit http://www.sap.com/solutions/solutionextensions.