Customer success story

Meet DIANA — Village Roadshow Group's first digital coworker

Duplicate Invoice Analysis and Notification Agent Built on BCS Symphony

How Village Roadshow Group replaced a sample-based duplicate invoice check with a digital coworker that reviews every supplier invoice before payment

Village Roadshow Group processes more than 132,000 supplier invoices a year across four divisions and eight currencies, against roughly A$425M in annual spend.
Its duplicate-check tool sampled invoices and found duplicates only after payment, so the finance team hired DIANA and gave her a job description.
Built on BCS Symphony, DIANA reads the full SAP ledger every day and scores each invoice for duplication.
Each morning, the accounts-payable team receives a short, ranked list of suspected duplicates, each supported by evidence and a recommended action.
The team makes every decision, and finance owns the rules.

What did Village Roadshow gain with DIANA?

DIANA went live 12 weeks after the first workshop and was onboarded to the accounts-payable team as a working colleague. The success story sets out each of these benefits in full.

Every invoice checked before payment

DIANA scores all 132,000 supplier invoices a year for exact and near duplicates before the payment run, which has replaced sample-based review with assurance on the whole ledger. Her detection logic was trained on 12 months of Village Roadshow's own accounts-payable history, so it reflects how the Group actually pays.

Cash protected and controls that hold up

Around 10 ranked candidates reach the team each morning, before the money leaves rather than after it. Finance owns the detection rules and thresholds, a person reviews every flagged invoice, and detection activity and review outcomes are tracked through auditable reporting.

Live in 12 weeks with no change to SAP

DIANA reads the ledger through a custom extraction with no modification to standard SAP objects. The vendor-managed subscription has been retired, and DIANA runs at a lower cost while freeing the team from hours of manual searching each week.

Get the success story →

What does the Village Roadshow team say?

We move close to half a billion dollars through accounts payable every year, in eight currencies. DIANA gives us something we never had: assurance on every single invoice, with an audit trail to match. She protects our cash before it ever leaves the door, and our controls are genuinely defensible.

Brad Stebbing Group Finance Manager, Village Roadshow Agent Coach

My team used to spend hours hunting for duplicates that might not even be there. Now DIANA hands them a short, ranked list each morning with the reasoning already done. They just review and action. She's the most reliable member of the AP team; onboarding her felt like onboarding a great new hire.

Robbie Hatherell Group AP/AR Manager, Village Roadshow Agent Boss

DIANA is the first of many. We set out to prove an AI agent could take real, judgement-based work off our team and do it to a higher standard, and we did it in twelve weeks, not eighteen months. What makes me proudest is that the business sees DIANA as a colleague, not a tool.

Graeme Burns Chief Information Officer, Village Roadshow Executive Sponsor

Frequently asked questions

What is DIANA?

DIANA is the Duplicate Invoice Analysis and Notification Agent, a digital coworker built on BCS Symphony. She works inside Village Roadshow's accounts-payable team, reading the SAP ledger daily, scoring every supplier invoice for exact and near duplicates and presenting a ranked list with evidence and a recommended action.

Did DIANA require any change to Village Roadshow's SAP system?

No. DIANA reads the accounts-payable ledger through a custom extraction over OData and RFC, with no modification to standard SAP core objects. The deployment runs against SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 8, and the ledger view she works from is refreshed every day.

Who decides what happens to a flagged invoice?

A person on the accounts-payable team decides every time. DIANA scores, ranks and attaches the evidence. Village Roadshow owns the detection rules, thresholds and acceptance criteria, and each decision the team records informs the next assessment, so detection improves with use.

Which results in the success story are live and which are modelled?

Invoice volume, currencies, daily exceptions and the 12-week delivery reflect the live deployment. Detection rate, time freed, projected value, ROI and payback are modelled on BCS benchmarks applied to Village Roadshow's annual volume, and the success story labels each figure accordingly.

Can BCS deliver a similar digital coworker for another finance team?

Yes. DIANA is the first of a family of finance coworkers on Symphony. BCS scopes the outcome with the finance team, builds and validates the coworker against 12 months of live data, takes it to production and supports it there. Download the success story, then contact BCS to discuss a first coworker.

How did Village Roadshow stop paying duplicate invoices?

In 12 weeks, the finance team moved from sample-based checks to assurance on all 132,000 invoices a year, with no change to SAP and the old subscription retired. The success story shows how it was done, who owns what, and which results are live and which are modelled.