At Equipment & Controls, Inc. (ECI), the accounting team put an autonomous AI co-worker on all of its customer AP portals and moved from doing that work manually to reviewing only what the AI had already done.
"Monto has really covered me since we started. I don't have to worry as much. That's the big takeaway"
About ECI
ECI has supplied process control and automation to customers in a range of industries since 1956, and is the Emerson Impact Partner in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and western Maryland. A small accounting team handles all of the invoicing for that 350-person operation.
Meet Matt
Matt Bizzack has led ECI’s accounting team for almost nine years. Stepping into the role, one problem stood out to him: keeping up with their biggest customers’ AP portals had quietly become a full-time job for his team.
The Challenge
A full week of manually submitting invoices
"One of the big pain points was this portal work. Every customer engagement is unique, and the manual portal work was extensive.”
Matt’s team handled coverage across their customers’ portals, logging into Open Invoice, Ariba, Coupa, and more, one at a time. They tracked each customer’s requirements by hand, keeping a separate table listing each customer, their portal, and their login details. Invoices were keyed one at a time, and rejections were found and cleared manually, with no single place to view statuses across them all. One team member carried most of this alone. “That was basically her full-time position,” Matt said. “Maybe 25 to 30 hours of her week was just submitting stuff.”
Portal invoices accounted for about a quarter of ECI’s invoices, and each one came with its own documents and formatting before anything would go through. “The portals basically have us doing their accounting for them,” Matt said. “That’s one of the big frustrations.” The accounting team kept naming the same three headaches: portal tasks, aging reports, and rejections.
Above all, their time was spent on repetitive manual work rather than on the tasks that required their judgment. “It’s something that definitely should be done by AI,” Matt said. “This is a process that is just ripe for that kind of thing.”
The Monto Solution
Monto became ECI’s AI co-worker for every customer AP portal
"Monto’s saving a ton of time, a lot of man-hours, and frustration. And it's the back-of-mind worry too, what if this person leaves tomorrow? That's covered now."
Matt found Monto at the NACM conference in Cleveland in 2025, noticing a booth listing the exact portals eating his team’s week. “I was hoping to find something that could do this,” he said. “I didn’t realize it actually existed.” His network had looked at another option, but it connected only one portal, and each one had to be built from scratch. Matt said, “I’ve got tons of portals. I needed a comprehensive solution.”
Today, ECI’s new AI co-worker delivers results, not software you have to run. Monto puts reliable agents on every one of ECI’s customer portals, each built on a rich context layer for full, end-to-end invoice-to-cash execution. Each agent reads the invoice, submits it in the exact format required by the customer’s AP portal, and tracks the PO and payment status independently.
The agents learn ECI’s data and customer-specific requirements, with Matt’s team reviewing exceptions. When something’s uncertain, the agent stops and asks ECI’s team, and that feedback loop moves it toward autonomy over time.
Matt handed over the portal credentials and was live within three weeks. “This was much faster than I thought,” Matt said. “It was literally within three weeks, and we were good to go.” The first real test came fast: his portal specialist left for a two-week vacation, and rather than cover her desk himself, Matt let his new co-worker run it.
Within weeks, exceptions dropped, and automation increased. “We definitely saw a decreased number of exceptions, both tasks and rejections,” Matt said.
The Impact
One AI co-worker.
A team that got its time back.
"This is one of those data tasks that takes specific knowledge and context that can absolutely be handled by AI.
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90% zero-touch payments. Before Monto, ECI submitted every portal invoice by hand. Today, 90% of them reach the portal without anyone touching them, lifting a heavy, end-to-end process off their desks.
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370+ hours back to the team. Monto now handles thousands of invoices and POs on its own. The team member who used to spend nearly a full week submitting invoices now reviews what the agents have already done and spends the rest of her time on collections, exceptions, and building customer relationships.
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11 customer AP portals, in one AI-powered dashboard. Today, Matt’s team has full visibility into all statuses across their portals. “With Monto, I’m able to see all of the things that are put through these portals, so I can monitor all of our past dues,” Matt said, “which I didn’t have as good insight into before.”
- 6% reduction in DSO, from an already strong baseline. Matt’s own focus was always the work itself. “Reducing DSO is not really the goal behind this,” he said. ECI’s DSO was already close to its payment terms before Monto came in. Even so, it moved another 6% in the right direction, and Matt’s confident his management is happy with this additional benefit and its impact on the bottom line.
ECI was Monto’s first customer from NAN, the North American Network of Emerson Impact Partners. An AI solution for customer AP portals was one of the group’s top 3 priorities, and Matt brought Monto to the group’s finance peers. ECI became the pilot, and 10+ other companies followed, thanks to ECI.