Henry Schein reduces Accounts Payable SLA by 67% with Pipefy automation and AI

Henry Schein One is the software division of Henry Schein, a global leader in solutions for healthcare professionals in the medical and dental segments. With a large-scale operation and a high volume of suppliers and invoices, the accounts payable team plays a critical role in ensuring financial efficiency and business continuity.

Before automation, the accounts payable process relied heavily on manual work and legacy systems. Suppliers sent documents by email, approvals happened in a decentralized way, and information was lost across different channels. This resulted in a high rate of operational errors, such as duplicate payments and incorrectly entered amounts, along with significant waste of time and resources.

The impact was felt daily by the team: long processing cycles that could take up to three weeks, constant rework, and an overloaded staff, with growing pressure to increase headcount to keep up with demand. In addition, the lack of end-to-end visibility made it difficult to track invoice status and make more strategic decisions.

Given this scenario, Henry Schein One needed to modernize its accounts payable process, reducing errors while gaining scale and operational efficiency, without giving up control, compliance, and the flexibility to adapt the workflow to its own internal policies.

In 2022, Henry Schein One chose Pipefy to fully digitize and automate its accounts payable process from supplier intake to payment release.

With Pipefy, the company moved to a single platform where:

• Suppliers fill out digital forms for onboarding and invoice submission
• Pipefy AI automatically extracts invoice data (such as number and amount)
• The system identifies the right approver based on internal rules
• Invoices are validated by humans and, once approved, integrated with the ERP for payment

The platform’s flexibility and customization were key, enabling the process to be shaped around the company’s policies — not the other way around.

Before automation, Henry Schein One’s accounts payable process was marked by decentralized approvals, excessive email exchanges, and legacy systems, resulting in long cycles, operational errors, and constant rework.

With Pipefy in place, the entire operation was centralized into a single digital workflow, bringing predictability, control, and traceability to the process.

Automation reduced processing time from up to three weeks to just seven days, a 66.6% drop in SLA, while virtually eliminating errors such as duplicate payments and data inconsistencies. With end-to-end visibility over invoices and suppliers, the team now operates with greater efficiency and security, scaling without increasing headcount and redirecting effort to higher-value, strategic work.

Henry Schein is a global provider of solutions for healthcare professionals across the medical, dental, and veterinary segments. The company offers products, services, and software solutions that help clinics and professionals operate more efficiently and stay focused on patient care.