Challenge

METRO AG is an international wholesale company with 17 million customers in 30+ countries within the hotel, restaurant, and catering industry. It receives a large number of international invoices in a wide variety of formats – often in paper form - that require processing as part of daily business. Before the introduction of ABBYY‘s intelligent document processing solution, these invoices were entered into the accounting system completely manually.

Solution

Automation at METRO AG was introduced step by step via METRO Digital, responsible for the parent company's digitization initiatives and gradually expanded from a few initial projects to an increasing number of countries. Today, the company has achieved successful partial intelligent automation of invoice processing, where ABBYY intelligent document processing technologies capture and extract data from the invoice image. The subsequent verification process is mostly performed by employees. The goal is to fully automate invoice processing, where no human processing is required.

With partial automation, ABBYY's IDP solution has already reduced the invoice processing turnaround time. In the case of full automation, the turnaround time has even been reduced from one to two days to approximately one hour. As a result, invoices can be paid more quickly by customers. And clients, in turn, take advantage of customer benefits when invoices are paid quickly.

In addition, ABBYY's solution provides significantly more of the additional information needed, while also including a compelling correction solution.

Value

• Drastic time savings in the invoice processing cycle of up to 90%.
• Significant reduction of workload in invoice processing and significant increase of productivity in the company
• Convincing correction solution and high quality rates