Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, announces that it has been selected by Sanden International (Europe) GmbH, a manufacturer of automotive and electrical equipment to some of the world’s leading companies, to automate the processing of its accounts payable, accounts receivable and procurement documentation through AI-driven technologies.
Implemented as a cloud service, Esker’s Accounts Receivable (AR) Accounts Payable (AP) and Procurement automation solutions have given Sanden International (Europe) GmbH the ability to streamline its accounting and procurement processes and benefit from eliminating manual inefficiencies.
Sanden International (Europe) GmbH was keen to streamline its AR processes and wanted to create a web portal to help facilitate communications initially between themselves and their customers. This would allow real-time joint visibility and access online to any invoice status, plus, freeing up internal financial and IT resources dedicated to managing this process.
Also, having the ability to automatically send invoices in customer-preferred formats (either paper or electronic), reduce internal support for AR invoice delivery, archiving invoices and associated documents, would all be of benefit, as well as the advantages gained by being able to easily adapt when more customers adopt electronic invoicing.
Having implemented the solution quickly and realising the benefits to be gained, Sanden International (Europe) GmbH soon turned its focus to the AP function to see if this could also be improved through automation. Like many organisations, Sanden International (Europe) GmbH experienced slow invoice processing times because of manual routing and sign-off requirements, reduced accuracy with manual data entry, a lack of visibility as to whether an invoice had been received, processed or paid, and the difficulty of retrieving manually stored invoices.
Esker was able to allow Sanden International (Europe) GmbH to automatically capture, route and prioritise its invoices according to predefined rules matched to particular attributes on the invoice, such as supplier, amount, buying entity, etc. Intelligent data capture would then extract the information for multi-level approval across multiple European countries, including mobile approvals. Upon the data being validated, this was then pushed into their SAP system automatically. Once the invoice was paid, the invoice status was updated before an electronic copy of the original document image, corresponding audit trail and history of modifications were created, should the information be required at a later date.
The Finance General Manager, Sanden International (Europe) GmbH, says, “The benefits of having a single platform to manage three key business processes were huge. We gained faster response times to invoice status calls, improved accuracy of our data entry, less time required to process invoices with automated and mobile multi-level approval, as well as increased visibility and heightened security with electronic archiving”.
Sanden International (Europe) GmbH will also use the Esker Procurement solution which allows different departments (e.g., purchasing, accounting, marketing, etc.) and different users (e.g., requester, budget owner, buyer, manager, etc.) to better manage indirect purchasing through an automated workflow. Every spend gets the required authorisation and every invoice can be matched with a purchase order (PO) all of which generally takes place outside of the ERP system. Any business, regardless of order volume or number of employees, can automate its entire purchasing cycle in a relatively short period of time.
“This allows us to control our budgets in real-time with greater process control and more efficient cash flow management. It’s great to have these key processes automated, using a single cloud solution”.
