Challenge
Virgin Orbit, the US small-satellite launch company, was manually processing thousands of invoices a month, ranging from five line items to upwards of 10,000. Their system required teams of supply chain experts to review documents by hand to hold accuracy where it needed to be. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) compliance meant some ERP systems had to stay separated inside secure networks, so data had to sync across multiple systems and the data flow had to integrate with many different applications.
Solution
We investigated off-the-shelf solutions, but ITAR requirements ruled most of them out, so we and Virgin Orbit agreed on a bespoke build in AWS GovCloud. The solution used AWS Lambda together with two open-source character recognition libraries, integrated with their existing ERP systems for full invoice processing automation. We designed a serverless application that scales and can be deployed within minutes of a feature being finished. Using AWS Lambda, CloudFormation, EC2 and Sagemaker, all infrastructure was represented as code with a fully automated build and deployment process. Serverless also meant Virgin Orbit paid only for code execution, with no servers to maintain.
Results
The proof of concept ran over 10,000 invoices and showed a 55% decrease in invoice and worksheet returns, with monthly processing times for work assemblies down 10% through more efficient JIT processing. Integrating the serverless application with the existing ERP systems streamlined invoice processing and improved both accuracy and efficiency, laying the groundwork for a scalable, automated process that cut manual intervention and let the team concentrate on launch operations.
