CHALLENGE

A MNC Lubricant Manufacturing and Trading Company encountered below challenges for her Account Payment (AP) Process:

1) Various units and formulas are used
Whereas engaging businesses across costal boundaries, the customer is using various units and formulas in calculating cost, price and quantity. Compared to normal use of invoice, where Quantity / Unit Rates are the standard format in communication, domain-specific units like number of cans / volume are used. This posts a big concern on the integration between systems and software.

2) Complicated Invoice Format
The Invoice formats adopted by the customer are not common across the market as these are more specifically used across the shipping industry. These invoices record over 10,000 transactions for the company.

3) Not able to add comment in system during AP approval process
During their AP approval process, user need to add comment or remark for approver’s reference. However, as their ERP system has limited room for extension and customization, it was hard for the staff to modify and refine the ERP data. They could only wrote their comment on invoice.

Moreover, due to ERP limitation, there is little room to modify their ERP system to optimize their AP process.

SOLUTION

WCL helped the customer to optimize their AP process without any ERP system modification.

We helped them to:

1. Capture necessary data in invoices and also invoice’s image by OCR Solution

2. Create an approval process which includes
a) E-from for submitter to add comment on particular invoices when necessary
b) Data verification against current database and to notify users on whether the extracted data is valid.
c) The approver can check on the invoice data against the invoice image.

3. Export the invoices’ data and comments to CSV file, so user can import that file to their ERP system easily for AP mapping process

BENEFITS

• Flexible data extractor

  As a highly customizable service, the settings for trading unit are in great flexibility for the company to decide. Human-instructed rules regarding the formulas in calculating the final values are available. The advanced captured data are sent to human verification.

• User-friendly approval gateway

  With Abbyy extracting the useful accounting data, OnBase provides an approval platform for users to check on the invoice data against the invoice image. OnBase also checks the extracted data against the current database and to notify users on whether the extracted data is valid.

  Duo screen with both the invoice image and extracted data, OnBase allow users to check extracted accounting data against the invoice image. At the same time, users can add comments on the specific invoice which facilitates the communication efficiency.

• Streamline integration between our AP solution and customer’s ERP system

  From invoice data extraction, unit calculation, to human verification and updating records in the ERP, the integration between Abbyy and OnBase provides an automated, user-friendly environment for processing account payable data.