Challenge

The Capgemini China Business Services processes approximately 2,000 financial documents per day on behalf of its clients. The documentation includes purchase-to-pay invoices, purchase orders and goods receipts in English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. After receiving the hard copies of the documents the accounts payable team manually inputs the specific data from the papers such as PO number, invoice number, invoice date, invoice number and invoice amount in the ERP system for further analysis.

Using such document-processing scheme, The Capgemini China Business Services faced a number of business critical challenges. The BPO center had to deal with costly storage of paper documents in order to apply to a specific financial document in case of disputes or errors. However, it took a lot of time to find the needed one in a physical archive. Besides, the lack of transparency of the invoice processing resulted in low efficiency of governance and business analysis. Additionally, labor-intensive manual work caused accuracy issues due to the human factor. The need to change the workflow became critical in order to increase workflow productivity and create new financial benefits for the clients.

Solution

In order to achieve important business goals, the Capgemini China Business Services decided to automate their financial documents processing. When searching for the suitable software, they contacted ABBYY Partner — WCL Solution Limited.

The product chosen for the project was ABBYY FlexiCapture — a scalable document capture platform with high accuracy of Asian languages recognition. The solution includes a generic template that helps Capgemini to handle many different kinds of invoices; also, an additional benefit was a possibility to create customized templates for invoices of larger volume to improve recognition accuracy, as the BPO Center had to deal with specific invoice types in higher volume.

Today, the documents processing looks completely different. After the paper invoices are sorted and labelled with barcodes, they enter the automated workflow system. Starting from this moment, users can track their status. On the first stage, the fiscal documents are scanned and document images are directed to ABBYY FlexiCapture via Hot Folder. The Hot Folder is used for scheduling batch processing according to the system load. After the recognition and data extraction steps, the system automatically performs verification according to a predefined set of rules. The user can also verify the correctness of the extracted data at the verification station. Finally, the results are automatically exported to a CSV file for further usage.

Results

Three months after the deployment, the Capgemini China Business Services managed to automate the invoice processing by 83%. In terms of recognition accuracy, the new system shows excellent results. Over the past 6 months, the customer has recorded 95% accuracy on printed invoices and 83% on hand-printed invoices. From the business perspective, the company has gained extra 33% of productivity.