The perfect mix for more efficiency in invoice receipt

For the last two years, the Swiss-based company Ammann has been using tangro for automatic invoice verification. "tangro IM fitted the bill right from the beginning," explains Schnelli, director of finance at Ammann, the decision for the solution from the software company in Heidelberg. "tangro IM is fully integrated in the SAP ERP system, so no additional hardware is needed for interpretation. This makes the tangro solution exceptionally cost-effective."

Since tangro IM offers exactly the features that Ammann was looking for, implementation was very rapid. "We were impressed by this lean, efficient project," Schnelli says. As an added benefit, the tangro user interface corresponds exactly to the SAP system, so hardly any special training was required.

Ammann chose to outsource the scanning process. The TIFF files that Ammann receives are interpreted by the tangro OCR server, reconciled with the SAP data and posted in the tangro IM invoice entry list. The complete analysis takes place in the SAP ERP system, avoiding unnecessary data transfers and redundancies. 

About 150 invoices arrive in the tangro IM entry list every day, with and without purchase order references. Invoices with a purchase order reference are particularly easy to process. If there are no deviations from the purchase order, these documents can be directly posted. If any discrepancies are found, such as missing deliveries or differences in price or quantity, the invoice is automatically forwarded through the tangro Business Workflow to the employee responsible for approving and releasing it. All invoices without a purchase order reference also enter the workflow. "It's extremely easy to use and the decision criteria are very user-friendly. What is also important to us is the fact that the tangro solution allows non-SAP users to participate in the release and approval process," says Karsten Schnelli.

Karsten Schnelli is very happy with the tangro Business Workflow. In the first stage, very simple release and approval processes were set up for the 200 or so employees involved in the workflow. This allowed more complex release procedures to be mapped in stage two.

Thanks to the workflow protocol, all processes are easy to keep track of and a document can be viewed whenever required at the touch of a button. Queries can now be dealt with much more promptly as the time needed to find the relevant process and document is minimal. Thanks to much faster invoice processing with tangro IM and the leaner release processes, document processing time has been cut by 40%. In addition to this, invoice verification requires only half as many people: just two employees to process around 150 invoices per day. "With tangro IM our document processing is much faster and more efficient. Knowing with confidence where a document is and what its status is at any given time is a major benefit for us," says Karsten Schnelli.