Markant, the service center in the B2B payment sector, processes over six million receipts a year for more than 200 retail and trading companies. Thanks to smart INVOICE, Markant can now respond even better to the special wishes and needs of its customers – indi­vi­du­ally, flexibly, scalably and, of course, powered by AI.

The market-proven Insiders solution smart INVOICE enables the Markant Group to achieve the highest quality and validity in the manage­ment of payment flows for its customers. More than 200 retail companies and around 15,000 indus­trial partners work with Markant in the Payment Services division. The payment service provider processes more than six million receipts per year, sometimes with hundreds of pages per document.

The multitude of customers and large number of industry partners who issue invoices to the trading companies results in an enormous variety of layouts and formats for the incoming documents. In addition, each customer usually has different requi­re­ments with regard to the fields to be read. In addition to standard mandatory fields such as document number or document date, some customers expect infor­ma­tion and logic to be read that is not standard and cannot be easily read by every OCR. Meeting these indi­vi­dual customer requi­re­ments ade­qua­tely is a major challenge for Markant.

In some cases, Markant handles all payment tran­sac­tions between suppliers and retailers for its customers in the contract business. Here too, there are enormous dif­fe­rences in the quality of the documents and therefore special requi­re­ments for OCR.

The business group was therefore looking for a reliable solution that not only delivers the highest quality and can react flexibly to changes, but also enables indi­vi­dual adapt­a­tions.

„We need both: the highest possible degree of auto­ma­tion and the highest quality. This is the only way we can effi­ci­ently offer our customers indi­vi­dual service with the enormous volumes of documents“

, says Torsten Breit­kreuz, Head of Inter­na­tional Projects at Markant, sum­ma­ri­zing the requi­re­ments. „With smart INVOICE from Insiders, we get all this and use AI as an enabler for inno­va­tion.“

The AI-supported two-stage solution for automated invoice pro­ces­sing achieves top scores for document reading quality, per­for­mance and user satis­fac­tion. Users in post-pro­ces­sing praise the ergo­no­mics of smart INVOICE, which also faci­li­tates the onboar­ding of new employees at Markant. Thanks to machine learning, manual acti­vi­ties for new customers can also be quickly reduced to a minimum.

While the initial aim was simply to replace manual data entry, the main focus was later on incre­asing the level of auto­ma­tion while main­tai­ning the highest quality. Today, Markant is par­ti­cu­larly focused on the sca­la­bi­lity of the solution in order to cope with incre­asing inter­na­tio­na­liza­tion.

For Markant, smart INVOICE is not just a simple document reading system, but an entire workflow with various com­pon­ents.

 „It is a great advantage for us that we can expand smart INVOICE indi­vi­du­ally. Sometimes, we have to check some things more spe­ci­fi­cally or in a special envi­ron­ment in order to really read out 100% valid data. Here we work very closely and in part­ner­ship with Insiders, who respond very flexibly to our indi­vi­dual requi­re­ments“

, explains Frank Groß, Product Owner DigiDoc Services / Archive Processes at Markant.

By working closely with the Insiders team, Markant benefits from all the advan­tages of a German manu­fac­turer with the cor­re­spon­ding proximity, direct access to product owners and deve­lo­pers of the product as well as a high level of con­ti­nuity in the people respon­sible.

Enthu­si­a­stic about the solution, Markant also uses smart INVOICE intern­ally for its own P2P processes. The other Insiders products are also of strategic interest to Markant, as customers are incre­asingly reques­ting the eva­lua­tion of other document types such as delivery bills or reminders.