Worldwide Provider of Electronics Manufacturing Services Achieves New Accounts Payable Efficiencies and Lowers Operating Costs
TACKLING INVOICE PROCESSING INEFFICIENCIES A Fortune 500 multinational provider of electronic manufacturing services
sought an automated solution to simplify the complexity of processing invoices
at its shared financial center in Europe. The company receives over 300,000
invoices each year and processes thousands of invoices daily. Every invoice is
typically three or four pages in length and includes intricate line item detail.
Through an evaluation of its business processes, the company found its
accounts payable process was an inefficient and expensive liability, and could
not scale to meet future expansion. Because the process required manual sorting,
data entry, lookup, and validation, it was also error prone. Rather than continue
to add staff to its financial services center, a decision was made to invest
in technology and avoid additional labor and operating costs.
The company enlisted the assistance of a business analyst and integration consultant
to help ensure that the right solution was implemented. Specifically,
while most data capture solutions can handle structured documents in which
data fields can be easily discerned, invoices, by contrast, are highly unstructured.
To fully realize the business benefit, the solution needed to efficiently
handle a virtually unlimited number of invoice formats. Finally, the solution
would have to handle multi-lingual documents, given the company´s geographically
dispersed business operations.
THE A/P-DISTILLER DIFFERENCE
Brainware´s intelligent data capture solution, A/P-distiller™, was selected for
its ability to reduce Accounts Payable inefficiencies, manpower requirements,
and overall operating costs. Unlike competing solutions that rely upon templates
and rules to extract information from documents, A/P-distiller excelled
during the evaluation with its ability to automatically analyze, recognize, classify,
and extract information based upon the actual content of the document.
A/P-distiller leverages proprietary neural network technology called
Brainware®, which learns by example and enables the software to accurately
classify invoices and extract data field items regardless of form or layout.
This capability helped the company eliminate countless hours of human labor
required to set up, define, and tweak template parameters for each type of
invoice layout. Instead, a simple training procedure that utilized a small number
of data samples was all the preparation that was required.
During training, A/P-distiller acquired implicit business knowledge to understand,
for example, what a purchase order (PO) number looked like on an
invoice. In this manner, A/P-distiller could differentiate between fields such as
PO numbers, product numbers, quantities, totals, and dates regardless of
where they appeared on a page.
Using a phased rollout, invoices were re-routed to the central shared service
center for settlement where A/P-distller received scanned images of invoices,
extracted data, validated the extracted information, checked regulatory and
VAT information, applied business workflow rules to route exceptions, and
archived the images for future access and retrieval.
The company´s consultant also integrated A/P-distiller with its enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system and document management system so that it
seamlessly forwarded the captured data for processing and storage.
Because A/P-distiller supports a variety of best-of-breed OCR engines, the
company was able to achieve a high rate of success in recognizing both typewritten
and handwritten characters. The company also appreciated that A/Pdistiller
flagged all results it was unsure of for exception handling. To optimize
data extraction results, fields were verified against external databases and systems.
A customizable key from image (KFI) interface enabled data entry operators
to quickly correct and key unrecognized characters.
RAPID ROI
Upon implementing A/P-distiller, the company saw immediate benefits in
reduced staffing requirements and increased productivity. Previously, 25 staff
across five different sites processed a maximum of 1,400 invoices a week.
Shortly after the implementation of A/P-distiller, three full-time and one part time
staff at the company´s services center began processing 2,400 invoices a
week - a 42% increase in productivity. The company expects that with no additional
headcount, it can process over 446,000 invoices a year.
The Brainware accounts payable solution extracts data from the received
invoice and, with minimal human intervention, posts the data directly to the
company´s ERP system. On average, over 50% of invoices are now processed
without human intervention.
The company and its business consultant recognize that A/P-distiller´ benefits
extend beyond its Accounts Payable application and plan to broaden its use
to include purchase orders, travel and entertainment forms, and shipping manifests.
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