Digital solutions the world over

The Zumtobel Group, a leading international provider of integrated lighting solutions, is pressing ahead with the digitalisation of all its business processes, which includes the processing of incoming invoices. The Zumtobel Group has been using tangro software for this purpose for over seven years to deliver greater speed and transparency in accounting. And not just at its head office in Dornbirn, Austria, but in 19 countries worldwide.

Zumtobel processes over 200,000 invoices a year with tangro. A large percentage of documents arrive as PDFs sent to a central e-mail address or as paper copies through the post. tangro automatically detects the content of these documents, interprets the values directly in SAP and compares them with the purchase order data. Some invoices are also received as EDI. tangro processes these documents automatically without any staff intervention. This has made invoice processing much faster and more efficient. Oliver Fiedler, Business Process Excellence Corporate Accounting at Zumtobel:

 “The majority of invoices are posted in two days or less. In the past, it took that long for them to simply pass through our internal post system."

Key to the high speed of processing is the fact that the tangro approval workflow also uses employees who aren't involved in the SAP environment. Fiedler:

“The invoice workflow uses a large number of colleagues, say in the sales field service, who don’t work in SAP but are still able to release a document. The tangro Business workflow includes this option.”

Another key factor is direct access to SAP master and transaction data. This speeds up reworking of the detected document content because the people responsible are able to directly access all relevant SAP data without a change of work station or interim storage issues. And employees also post the documents directly from tangro. Oliver Fiedler:

“We simply couldn't envisage processing without direct access to the SAP data. SAP is the main system used at Zumtobel, and all solutions have to integrate seamlessly. tangro satisfies this requirement perfectly.”

At any one time, they know exactly the stage of processing reached by all individual documents. Oliver Fiedler: “This transparency is hugely important to us because our accounting departments generally process invoices from several locations. Here in Dornbirn, for example, we process incoming invoices for all Austrian companies and sites...

...tangro gives us a complete overview of all incoming documents at all times.”

Around the globe, the Zumtobel Group uses tangro in 19 different countries and around 40 companies – everywhere from Sweden to Australia. It’s so easy for the software to be rolled out that Zumtobel has a two-man team for the task.

These two employees organise procurement of the scanners needed for the paper documents, set up the e-mail inboxes required and handle all the necessary customizing. Once the local accountant and possibly buyer have been trained, automated processing can get started. And everything is done by e-mail and MS Teams without the roll-out team even having to be on-site. Fiedler:

“It’s incredibly simple and has worked very well for the individual companies,”

The next roll-out is imminent and is scheduled for the United Arab Emirates. Fiedler is convinced it too will run smoothly.

“The whole thing takes just two weeks, and then our colleagues on the ground go live.”

About Zumtobel Group

The Zumtobel Group is an international lighting concern and a leading supplier of innovative lighting solutions, components and associated services. Through its brands acdc, Thorn, Tridonic and Zumtobel, the group of companies provides its customers all around the world with an extensive range of products and services. With its Thorn and Zumtobel brands, the company is a European market leader in the luminaire industry. The group plays a leading global role in the production of hardware and software for lighting systems through its Tridonic technology brand. The group of companies is listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange (ATX Prime) and currently employs around 6,000 members of staff. In the 2019/20 fiscal year, the company recorded sales of €1131.3 million. The group headquarters are in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg (Austria).