Paragon Footwear Processes ₹650 Crore in Payments Across 8,000 Vendors with IQInvoice

Challenge

Paragon Footwear is one of India’s largest footwear manufacturers - managing an 8,000-vendor supply chain and processing ₹650 Crore in annual payments. Before IQInvoice, the AP function was handling a mix of e-invoices, emailed invoices, and manual paper documents with no automated capture or validation in place.

Manual GST compliance checks were consuming significant team time. With 8,000 vendors across a complex procurement network, verifying GSTIN validity and catching filing mismatches before submission was an ongoing manual burden that scaled directly with invoice volume.

Vendor onboarding was slow and error-prone. Without automated verification, the process required manual document collection and compliance checks - creating delays in activating new vendors and increasing the risk of non-compliant vendors entering the payment flow.

The SAP HANA environment added technical complexity. Integration with SAP HANA’s licensing and configuration requirements presented a challenge for most AP tools on the market - creating cost and implementation risk. Standard integration approaches were either expensive, required significant customisation, or introduced licensing overhead that made the business case difficult to justify.

Solution

IQInvoice resolved the multi-format invoice capture challenge with ICR/OCR email ingestion - automatically extracting data from e-invoices, emailed PDFs, and paper documents into a single processing queue, eliminating manual data entry at intake.

Customisable DoA-based approval workflows routed each invoice to the correct approver based on Paragon’s delegation structure - standardising the approval process across the entire 8,000-vendor base without manual routing.

GST compliance checks and vendor onboarding automation were embedded at the point of intake. Vendors were validated before activation, and invoices were checked for GST accuracy before reaching the payment queue.

SAP HANA integration was implemented cleanly - resolving the licensing and integration complexity that had made other solutions impractical. IQInvoice connected to the existing SAP HANA instance without introducing additional licensing overhead.

Beyond core AP, Paragon adopted three additional modules: the Purchase module for centralised PO and quotation management; the Job Work module for real-time tracking of outsourced manufacturing processes; and the Asset Purchase module for structured procurement of capital assets.

Paragon Footwear’s SAP HANA deployment is one of IQInvoice’s largest manufacturing implementations. The clean SAP HANA integration resolved the licensing complexity that had made other solutions impractical. Read more customer stories in our case studies.