Inter­na­tional Invoice pro­ces­sing at BSH

1.6 million invoices per year – sites throug­hout the whole of Europe and the rest of the world – different spoken and written languages – various cur­ren­cies and special country-specific con­side­ra­tions. These were the requi­re­ments that BSH Haus­ge­räte GmbH , Europe’s largest and one of the world’s leading manu­fac­tu­rers of household appli­ances, had for modern and sus­tainable invoice pro­ces­sing. Added to this were the well-known problems asso­ciated with pro­ces­sing invoices in the con­ven­tional way.
At BSH, most invoices had pre­viously been captured manually, resulting in an enormous amount of work, high sus­cep­ti­bi­lity to errors, ina­de­quate data quality and incom­plete invoice infor­ma­tion for down­stream processes. In short, a low level of effi­ci­ency at the very beginning of the invoice process, at all national sub­si­diary sites throug­hout the world.

„Pro­ces­sing inter­na­tional invoices with a standard product – this is what impressed us about Insiders from the very beginning. Today, we process our incoming invoices in more than 30 inter­na­tional sub­si­dia­ries using Invoice Manage­ment from Insiders – highly effi­ci­ently and con­ve­ni­ently.“

Markus Schwein­berger, Head of Accoun­ting Standards and Prin­ci­ples, BSH Haus­ge­räte GmbH

SIIM – Stan­dar­dized Incoming Invoice Manage­ment

The go-ahead for the SIIM (Stan­dar­dized Incoming Invoice Manage­ment) project at BSH was therefore given. The primary aim was to stan­dar­dize the pro­ces­sing of incoming invoices with an automatic, paperless process throug­hout the entire company and at all inter­na­tional sites.

The company chose the Invoice Manage­ment solution from Insiders, with the smart INVOICE TABLE standard product. At BSH, the universal, creditor-inde­pen­dent invoice reader extracts header and footer data and the important item data from all incoming invoices. Numerous logical checks and intel­li­gent database matching pro­ce­dures ensure that the extracted invoice infor­ma­tion is of a high quality. A standard interface then transfers the data to the down­stream workflow.

Faster and more Efficient Invoice Process

From the very beginning, the key criterion for the success of the project was a very short invoice throughput time. Now, with FI invoices (invoices without an order reference), infor­ma­tion about the approver of the invoice who has respon­si­bi­lity within the workflow is also already added when the invoice is captured using smart INVOICE TABLE. In this way, the invoice can be auto­ma­ti­cally forwarded to the employee respon­sible when it is trans­ferred to SAP. There is no longer any need for sub­se­quent time-consuming assign­ment in the workflow and the invoice can be checked, approved and posted imme­dia­tely. The danger of losing discounts is a thing of the past.

At the same time, the account asso­cia­tions for FI invoices are already captured in smart INVOICE TABLE. If required, the invoice line items are broken down and assigned to the correct imper­sonal accounts. This also saves BSH time spent handling the invoice in sub­se­quent book­kee­ping steps and speeds up the entire process.

Inter­na­tional Roll-out

Today, BSH processes more than 1,600,000 invoices every year via all its national sub­si­dia­ries using the Insiders solution. After start-up in Germany and Spain, the solution was launched in the Scan­di­na­vian countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, plus the Baltic region with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They were followed by Poland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Singapore and South Africa, among others. In between, the Insiders products are in use at BSH in over 30 countries.

The solution’s subsystem capa­bi­lity in par­ti­cular ensures that it can be deployed inter­na­tio­nally. This makes it possible to integrate other national sub­si­dia­ries without a great deal of admi­nis­tra­tive work. BSH is currently in the test phase for use in Malaysia.

The solution’s language inde­pen­dence is of great benefit to BSH in this context. For example, all the cha­rac­ters and cur­ren­cies for the various countries are already included in the standard product. Country-specific requi­re­ments, e.g. checking for VAT com­pli­ance, meet all of BSH’s needs. And what is more, to ensure that order cor­re­la­tion also works outside of the Euro zone, two cur­ren­cies are extracted if required, i.e. the order currency and the national currency.

 

Intel­li­gent Process Con­trol­ling

Com­pre­hen­sive con­trol­ling allows to monitor and control the entire invoice process and supports BSH when imple­men­ting opti­miza­tions while the system is running. Clear and intuitive graphical reports provide complete, trans­pa­rent and con­stantly up-to-date infor­ma­tion about the pro­ces­sing procedure. Data con­cer­ning the invoice pro­ces­sing per­for­mance is therefore always available and BSH employees can supply infor­ma­tion about the status of all invoices at any time.

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