Case Study

Renewed Energy in Invoice Receipt

Swiss Energy Provider Processes Incoming Invoices with Invoice CENTER for SAP®

Manual processing of incoming invoices requires unnecessary labor and distracts employees and companies from their central tasks and production processes. Centralschweizerische Kraftwerke AG (CKW) has also recognized this fact and decided on an IT-based solution using automated invoice recognition. Instead of continuing to pour unnecessary labor into the processing of incoming invoices, the long-established energy provider has chosen to reassign its specialist staff to what it has been doing best since the end of the 19th century: Reliably providing central Switzerland with electricity.

The user

CKW, which was founded over 110 years ago, is a leading utilities and services provider for electrical energy, providing electricity to over 130,000 customers. The CKW group has 1,473 employees, of which 535 are employed by CKW. The Swiss energy supplier essentially provides the canton of Lucerne with electricity, most of which is delivered directly to the end customer. Due to its long-term contracts, CKW guarantees the supply of electricity to central Switzerland and ensures the optimal use of the region’s water power. This makes CKW the backbone of central Switzerland’s electricity supply.

The challenge

For some time, CKW has been calling for a new, modern solution for the internal processing of incoming invoices. Since the manual method of capturing and processing invoices left room for improvement in many regards, and the requirements had become worse over time, the desire for such changes has gained increasing support. “The number of documents to be processed was growing constantly," explains Astrid Sturm, CKW’s bookkeeping project assistant. “The average processing time of a document was so high that discount deductions could not be optimally utilized.”

In order to increase productivity, supplier invoices needed to be centrally captured from now on and the whole process will be streamlined. The release process and posting will now occur electronically and thus take place more quickly and easily. The posting should be documented, the documents electronically archived and the status overview of unposted and open supplier invoices should be improved.

Furthermore, there were requirements regarding integration with the SAP systems that Centralschweizerische Kraftwerke AG has been using since 1994. “The new solution had to be able to be integrated into the existing SAP workflow,” says Astrid Sturm. Authorized SAP users should be able to access supplier invoices at any time from any location.

The solution

A solution that satisfied this broad array of requirements was quickly found. CKW decided on an automatic processing and management system for incoming invoices using Invoice CENTER for SAP from Open Text Document Technologies. The system has all of the requested functions, is completely integrated with SAP and is SAPcertified. All SAP master data is available in real time for Invoice CENTER. Furthermore, operations in various locations are supported by the multi-client capability.

It is the ideal solution for CKW's requirements. Integrated into the Lucerne-based company's SAP R/3 Business Workflow, Invoice CENTER has read, recognized and analyzed around 70,000 invoices per year since then. The archived documents can be reproduced at any time and, if necessary, can be printed or sent by fax or e-mail. The system has been tailored to fit CKW's exact requirements through individual adjustments. One major deviation from the standard version is a portal solution in which the approval cycles are collected and sent twice daily to the recipient. The portal solution also provides the ability to check the amount when sending the documents into the approval cycle. “The company's infrastructure made it essential to be able to approve documents outside of the SAP system,” explains Astrid Sturm.

The Advantage

“User-friendly, simple, logical,” is how Astrid Sturm quickly summarizes Invoice CENTER for SAP’s usability, confirming that it fulfills the important demands that the leading utilities and service provider in central Switzerland placed upon its automated invoice processing system. The electronic data processing system currently processes invoice volumes for two companies and has resulted in the desired significant reduction of costs, a reduction in personnel costs, and a lower error rate and runtime for invoices.

Following the introduction of Invoice CENTER, workers at CKW also noticed a clear improvement in the internal control throughout document processing. “Internal control is now much more transparent, and in some parts of the process, this is the first time we’ve been able to exercise internal control at all,” says Astrid Sturm. This transparency was enabled, above all, by the electronic documentation and archiving features in the document processing procedure. In this way, the processing of documents remains easy to follow at all times.

Training for the new system took place onsite and went well, according to CKW. “According to an internal survey, the employees are pleased with the new solution,” reports Astrid Sturm. “The decisive factor for us is that none of the users want to go back to the old solution.” As a result of the project’s successful progress and the high rate of acceptance, CKW now wants to extend the present solution to other companies.

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