A leading energy company in Europe, innogy, had many document processes that required intelligent technology:

• Relocating 80,000 outgoing invoices from a paper to a digital archive
• Managing waybills and material test certificates directly in SAP to prevent loss or wear of the printed documents
• Automating the handling of administrative offenses (tickets) in fleet management, taking care of several hundred company cars, and reducing it to two to three minutes per procedure

Energy supplier innogy, implemented Ephesoft Transact to handle their large volume of document processes, along with many other processes throughout their organization.

In search of a document capture solution was capable of handling printed as well as digital information, innogy came across Ephesoft. Modern technology and the license model made it easy to prove to them: innogy gains efficiency by using Ephesoft’s reliable and intelligent Transact technology for multiple projects. Additionally, innogy had an advantage that resources and expertise already existed within the IT department. They gathered ideas and suggestions from operational departments to determine their requirements. After their due diligence internally, innogy is implementing optimization projects single-handedly and is already looking to the future to plan their next steps.

innogy SE is a leading German energy company, with revenue of around €43 billion (2017), more than 42,000 employees and activities in 16 countries across Europe. With its three business segments Renewables, Grid & Infrastructure and Retail, innogy addresses the requirements of a modern, decarbonised, decentralised and digital energy world.

IT innovations within the energy enterprise are often driven out of line of business departments, who seek support from IT for the implementation process. Systems are then selected together or through the IT department. Some of their departments were looking for quick relief from manual processes to successfully manage the workload with less resources. innogy found that automating smart document capture and processing on various levels could drive efficiency. Further, automating business processes allows employees to focus less time on organizational and routine tasks, and more time on high-value work. In particular, innogy identified that the accounting, logistics and fleet management departments would require a new solution for the processing of their immense amounts of documents.

Another challenge was the energy supplier’s innovative business strategy required new processes. Together with over 100 partners, innogy has one of the largest charging networks for electric vehicles, with over 7,000 charging spots worldwide. These charging spots generate, from commissioning to maintenance, an immense amount of paper, which can hardly be processed manually. The company saw an opportunity with Ephesoft to use a reliable software solution and solve their document challenges.

innogy’s IT department consists of experts who are capable of implementing most of the process digitization themselves. The missing piece was a platform solution with an appealing license model, which would be suitable for flexible use in different scenarios and allows an in-house implementation. innogy found all of these features in Ephesoft. The announcement of 2 major releases with new functionality per year convinced the energy group to move forward.

With the core competence of Ephesoft Transact and its Smart Capture® approach, innogy has already been able to implement numerous different projects themselves. To do this, the team initially installed the solution on a test server on a local database, which worked smoothly and quickly. When moving over to the production server, innogy’s IT department worked closely with Ephesoft, since innogy was the first company to use an Oracle database. This was a technical challenge that the experts could solve easily together as a team with the necessary expertise. After a successful migration, the IT team of innogy developed the necessary knowledge to solve independently based on the provided YouTube tutorials from Ephesoft.

Subsequently, the IT specialists used their recently learned expertise to give a short 2-3 hour briefing and training to the other line of business departments. Due to the intuitive, web-based interface, there was not extensive training needed and solutions were quickly adopted and put into productive operation in all areas identified. The connection to their Konica Minolta hardware is still running and will be released with collaboration between Ephesoft and innogy.

Zia experts were able to address any questions the team had about Ephesoft, especially around customization and flexibility. Dave Fairbanks, founder of eReplacementParts.com, said “Zia consultants were essential in helping us assess our actual needs, understanding how the technology could be used, and determining what type of solution would work best with our environment and budget.” After receiving a demo and trying the software, eReplacementParts. com selected Ephesoft and Zia to help configure and provide support through the implementation.

The IT group determined that the cost of Ephesoft was 80% lower than other proprietary document capture solutions and offered a scalable platform that could grow with the organization. “We are an IT-savvy company and did most of the Ephesoft implementation ourselves. We leveraged Zia to help us through any questions or issues that we had,” said Fairbanks. Zia helped eReplacementParts.com determine how to configure the solution and where to customize it. Zia also helped address any bugs in the software and fixed it so that the IT group could complete the implementation.eReplacementParts.com easily customized Ephesoft to meet their specific needs and leveraged advanced product features. For example, with the database lookup functionality, the company can compare information from paper documents with their database. This, combined with some custom JavaScript, ensures that vendor, product, and pricing information is accurate. JavaScript is also used to read and add each line item on an invoice ensuring it matches the total number of parts listed. This is no longer calculated manually, saving time and improving accuracy.

Today, when paper invoices arrive, they are scanned using Fujitsu scanners with Kofax to improve readability. Images enter the Ephesoft server where text is extracted from the documents and converted into an electronic form. The IT group created custom forms to integrate with their ERP systems. The system quickly retrieves the appropriate data fields for classification and validates the information with POs and the receipts database, flagging exceptions or directing the document to the appropriate system for processing.