Meridian enables INEOS Business drive to improve VAT compliance and process efficiency

For INEOS, the Meridian VAT Add-on for SAP was an effective solution, as its functionality and design met our objectives. 

Based in London, INEOS is a privately owned, global manufacturer of petrochemicals, specialty chemicals and oil products, with $60 billion in annual sales. It comprises 34 businesses each with a major chemical company heritage. Its production network spans 183 sites in 26 countries throughout the world.

Before : Challenges and Opportunities

INEOS had a customized solution for Value-Added Tax (VAT) treatment that was developed to cope with its complex business model. This served INEOS well over the years, but the business wanted to move to a solution that was better suited for the future, was less dependent on IT resources, and could cope with a continuously changing environment. INEOS was looking for a software solution to overcome the following challenges:

• Expensive and time-consuming manual processes to determine VAT compliance
• High costs associated with validating Accounts Payable (AP) data manually
• Expensive and continuous VAT training program required for AP staff
• They also needed a solution that could be implemented in the existing SAP ECC environment and then be migrated to S/4 Hana

Why Meridian?

• For INEOS, the Meridian VAT Add-on for SAP was an effective solution, as its functionality and design met our objectives. If we had to build in this automation from scratch, it would have been a significantly longer and a significantly more expensive project.
• Also, the Meridian solution meets our objectives in terms of being easily technically scalable. We implemented initially on ECC and can transition to S4 HANA. During this process, it was also an assurance that the Meridian solutions were fully certified by SAP at each stage of the process.

After : Value driven results and improvements in tax efficiencies

• One of the key INEOS objectives was to eliminate manual intervention in the VAT determination process. They wanted to do this directly in SAP without adding complexity to their new VAT design. They also wanted this to be flexible so that future complexities could be easily added, without further development. The VAT Add-on for SAP was an effective solution for INEOS, as itsfunctionality and design fitted neatly into their objectives.
• If INEOS had to build in this automation from scratch, it would have been a significantly longer and a significantly more expensive project.
• As part of the implementation phase, Meridian also activated the ‘Plants Abroad’ functionality with SAP thereby allowing Ineos to automate the VAT reporting of cross border movement of own goods, including consignment stock allocations and so called ‘two-legged’ transactions.