Automated Invoice Processing: Wien-Süd is Now ‘Ephesofting’ with adesso Austria

Wien Süd committed itself to comprehensive digitization in the second quarter of 2018 and began the search for a suitable partner for the project. The first presentations of three providers took place in summer. By November, after a proof of concept, the decision had been made in favor of adesso Austria with Ephesoft Transact.

The strategy was convincing: the entire formal invoice verification process would be automated using Ephesoft Transact. This would reduce the error rate in the current barcode process, relieve workload pressure from employees and improve the efficiency of the entire invoice processing workflow. The solution resulted in a considerable relief of employees’ workloads and increased productivity, because almost every incoming invoice needed to be corrected at one point or another – whether because of changed bank details, incorrect address information or other relevant details. Robust, errorfree master data maintenance was the key to success.

After the team from Wien-Süd, adesso Austria and Ephesoft had drawn up the roadmap for the transformation project at the beginning of February 2019 and got to work on it. ‘Go Live’ was scheduled for February 2019 after successful completion. Every employee that touched the invoicing process was notified and trained if they were going to use the system. Throughout the entire digitization project, Wien-Süd was careful to use professional change management techniques and transparent communication, active employee involvement and the necessary sensitivity in implementing all necessary changes.

The original process had no fewer than four manual steps before the document in question even got into the actual workflow: the initial manual review of the incoming invoice, entering essential information into the ERP system, assigning a barcode and scanning the invoice. Ephesoft Transact reduces this effort to a single task: scanning the invoice. From this moment on, the software automatically reads all the relevant information via OCR, transfers it to the ERP system via a technical interface and records it correctly so it can be processed further. After the content has been approved by the respective department directly in the system, the invoice is automatically posted and the responsible person receives a payment advice when it is due, which they can confirm and execute with just a click.

Even after the barcode process had been modified, what used to take about three minutes to enter an invoice now has dropped to an average of 42.6 seconds! Employees scan all documents with a
CANON ImageFormula DR-6030c and Ephesoft Transact then classifies each invoice into the correct batch class, uses OCR identification and smart capture technologies to extract the necessary data and communicates automatically with the ERP system. In the first six months, Wien-Süd had already been able to increase the straight-through processing to 93 % by using Ephesoft Transact – 85.81% of all invoices already run through the new process. Just a few exceptions have to be processed manually.

But the team is still working to improve exceptions and errors: in the future, suppliers will be required to submit their invoices digitally as PDF documents, dispensing with the scanning step. In the meantime, all incoming invoices will be processed automatically. Ephesoft Transact will be rolled out in the next project for construction documents and incoming mail areas at Wien-Süd so they can also benefit from the many benefits that have already been demonstrated in incoming invoice processing.

The new solution meant Wien Süd could seamlessly continue to efficiently handle the invoice receipt process during the Coronavirus lockdown. Thanks to the new, location-independent process, they only need one employee at headquarters to scan the invoices. The entire process can then be completed by colleagues working from home via web access to Ephesoft Transact.