Schreiber Foods, the world’s largest employee-owned food and beverage manufacturer with annual sales of more than $7 billion, today announced results from an artificial intelligence (AI) initiative that is helping modernize finance operations across the company while maintaining strong financial controls, governance, and human accountability.
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Working with OpenEnvoy, Schreiber has applied AI within its accounts payable processes to improve efficiency, make everyday work simpler and more intuitive for finance teams, and strengthen operational performance across portions of its global business.
As part of its broader digital transformation efforts, Schreiber worked with OpenEnvoy to apply AI within accounts payable and accounts receivable, enabling the finance organization to focus more on governance, analysis, and exception management while automating routine matching activities.
The results were substantial. Over the past year, the initiative significantly improved processing speed and efficiency. In Europe, median invoice cycle time declined by 80 percent while overall invoice volumes remained stable. In the U.S., automation increased by 160 percent. This gave finance teams better tools, fewer manual tasks, and more time for decisions that require human judgment.
Putting Control Back in the Controller Function
With OpenEnvoy, Schreiber shifted its focus from maintaining invoice-matching rules to governing the outcomes those rules were designed to achieve. Rather than spending time updating and managing increasingly complex instructions, the finance organization now concentrates on approval policies, exception management, auditability, and compliance.
In place of instructions, OpenEnvoy’s models learned how Schreiber’s own team resolved exceptions across six months of production work, then made the same decisions a person would at volume and without configuration. Schreiber employee-partners moved from writing the logic to setting the boundaries within which the models operate.
The distinction matters to how a finance organization engages its mandate. Maintaining the rules carried the shape of control and the substance of clerical work, because every new supplier format required another instruction. Setting the thresholds, holding the exception policy and owning the audit record is the control a controller is accountable for, and it is the work OpenEnvoy returned to them.
“The technology changed the work, but it didn’t reduce the importance of the people doing it. Our team spends less time managing process complexity and more time applying judgment, strengthening controls, building relationships with suppliers, and helping the business make smarter decisions. That’s a better experience for our employee-partners and a better outcome for Schreiber.”
Tim Noonan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schreiber Foods
“The market doesn’t typically look at an 80-year-old Midwestern food company and expect to see leading-edge AI deployment. That’s exactly why this work matters. Working with OpenEnvoy, we focused on solving a real business problem, strengthening our controls, and making work better for our finance teams. The results show innovation is most powerful when it’s grounded in practical business needs and supported by the right technology partner.”
Sri Kantamneni, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer, Schreiber Foods
The Work That Remains
Roughly a quarter of European payable invoices and a sixth of U.S. payable invoices continue to require a person, and each takes several working days to resolve. Those invoices stay with Schreiber’s teams by design, because they are the ones where judgment, vendor history or policy decides the outcome. The approach is deployed across Schreiber’s European and Mexican operations, with other regions to follow.
“Most companies hand their finance teams a chat bot then pay expensive consultants to analyze why they didn’t see results. Instead, Schreiber leadership committed to real outcomes and empowered their global business and financial operations with OpenEnvoy’s most advanced thinking models. The result is an extreme increase in efficiency and most importantly, a substantial financial return.”
Matthew Tillman, CEO, OpenEnvoy
About Schreiber Foods
Schreiber Foods strives to do good through food every day. Based in North America, Schreiber is an employee-owned, customer-brand leader in cream cheese, natural cheese, process cheese, beverages and yogurt. Its more than 10,000 employees and presence on five continents enable Schreiber to be an essential ingredient in its customers’ success.
With annual sales of more than $7 billion, Schreiber partners with the best retailers, restaurants, distributors and food manufacturers around the globe. Schreiber also recognizes its responsibility to do good in the world and is driven to make a difference in everything it does.
About OpenEnvoy
OpenEnvoy pioneered Autonomous Finance™, delivering AI-powered solutions that transform financial operations and protect working capital. Our platform brings autonomous intelligence to accounts payable, accounts receivable, and document processing, empowering finance teams to eliminate manual tasks and gain real-time visibility into their financial operations. Global enterprises trust OpenEnvoy to drive operational excellence through autonomous financial processes.
Learn more at www.openenvoy.com.
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