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BASF
BASF is one of the world’s leading chemical companies and stands for chemistry for a sustainable future. Approximately 111,000 employees across the BASF Group contribute daily to the success of customers in nearly every industry and in almost every country around the world. The Group’s annual procurement volume exceeds 30 billion euros—from approximately 70,000 suppliers worldwide.
To process the resulting approximately 3.5 million incoming invoices per year from more than 80 countries, BASF relies on the cloud service e-invoice pro ( formerly smart INVOICE) from Insiders Technologies. The solution enables fully automated document capture with high data quality—the foundation for end-to-end straight-through processing in the SAP system.
Industry
Chemicals / Global Operations
Product
e-invoice pro
Volume
3.5 million invoices per year /
approx. 10 million pages
“Our process was already largely optimized in terms of workflow. It was therefore clear to us that, to further increase efficiency, we needed to rely on new technologies in the field of artificial intelligence to achieve greater automation. The intelligent cloud services from Insiders Technologies—and specifically e-invoice pro for invoice processing—quickly won us over with their innovative concept and top-notch performance.”
Rita Lampasona-Hornung
Head of Accounts Payable EMEA, BASF
Project Overview
What was the
initial situation?
- Approximately 3.5 million incoming invoices per year in PDF or paper format from more than 80 countries
- A wide variety of languages, scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Asian), and calendar systems made automated processing difficult
- Random layouts, poor paper quality, and handwritten additions increased the amount of manual work
- The expiration of the contract with the previous extraction solution provided an opportunity to fundamentally increase the level of automation
- BASF had already received the “World-Class” award for process efficiency—further potential lay in technological advancement
Why the decision
Insiders?
- Extensive market research and a formal request for proposals led to Insiders Technologies being selected as the preferred provider
- Layout-independent AI-based recognition without complex rule sets—crucial given the wide variety of suppliers and formats
- Convincing proof of concept with top-notch recognition performance
- Comprehensive validation options: internal plausibility checks as well as reconciliation with SAP master data and order information
- Cloud service with an ISO/IEC 27001-certified data center in Germany builds the necessary trust
- High user-friendliness enabled rapid onboarding of approximately 400 users across three service hubs worldwide
How was the solution implemented?
- Concept development, planning, implementation, and global rollout in less than ten months—with a fixed closing date of October 15 for the annual financial statements
- First-ever use of a full-cloud solution with ERP integration and AI in a P2P project at BASF
- Agile project methodology with extensive parallel processing: In just one week, 40 country subsidiaries alone were migrated simultaneously
- Rollout across three service hubs (Berlin, Montevideo, Kuala Lumpur) in less than three months
- Interdisciplinary core team of 20 to 30 people at BASF and Insiders Technologies with full management backing
- Intensive change management and training to help all users understand how AI works
How can success
be measured?
- Processing time for invoices reduced by more than 50%
- 40 FTEs saved through automation
- More than 60 fields in the invoice header and over 20 fields at the line item level are now fully captured
- Fully automated recognition rates of 100% or just below across the entire range of fields
- Significantly increased proportion of documents processed via dark processing in SAP (auto-posting)
- Continuous optimization of key metrics through the integrated business analytics tool smart ACT
What are the next steps?
- Pilot testing of additional use cases in the P2P process, such as processing order confirmations
- Continuous monitoring and data-driven efficiency improvements through smart ACT
- Exploring additional use cases in the Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay processes