Case Study

On air: Invoice CENTER at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk

For the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, WDR (West German Broadcasting Service), the manual processing of invoices is a thing of the past. As of now, all invoice processing tasks are undertaken by the software Invoice CENTER for SAP ^®.

The WDR broadcasts 149 hours of radio and 35 hours of television every day. To achieve this, the WDR has around 4,400 employees working in its editing, production, technical services and administration departments. They in turn are supported by some 22,000 freelancers, who are involved in manuscript writing, news delivery and the presentation of programmes. In order to ensure the fast and problem-free broadcasting of all WDR productions, all department heads at the WDR are authorised to place external purchase orders.

The accounts payable department at the WDR currently receives around 60,000 invoices every year and this number is increasing. They are the result of purchase orders for supplies and services placed either by the central purchasing department or by one of the many department heads. The WDR has no obligations to any particular suppliers. This means that nearly all the invoices come in a different layout. Thus, as a rule, the more suppliers the WDR has, the greater the variety of invoice layouts it receives. This presents a major challenge for invoice processing!

The existing SAP Business Workflow™ system controls the new invoice processing software and all the steps of digital invoice analysis for the central purchasing department, the accounts payable department and the department heads. It is crucial that users without an SAP^® connection can access the data and approve and forward invoices. All archived documents are then available to the user via the ArchiveLink^® interface.

The invoices are firstly scanned and filed in the connected IXOS archive (early archiving). From here the SAP Business Workflow takes over. The Workflow passes the digital documents to the document analysis software. This software recognises and extracts all the relevant invoice data. This data is automatically compared with the SAP suppliers database for purchase order-related invoices. The Workflow passes any incomplete or incorrect invoices directly to a connected validation workstation, where an operator manually enters the missing data. In turn, this data is automatically written to the Invoice CENTER Mask. The SAP Workflow passes invoices awaiting approval to the connected IXOS Workflow. This Workflow controls the release process.

The real challenge for automated invoice processing is the multitude of different invoice layouts. Different layouts can only handled accurately by a document analysis software such as DOKuStar that uses free-form recognition.
DOKuStar is an integral part of Invoice CENTER for SAP and has access to a knowledge base for recognising invoice-related fields. Using this knowledge base, DOKuStar is able to find and recognise an average of 70 to 90 per cent of the relevant information from any kind of invoice without error. The software is able to achieve this without first having to be trained on the customer's invoices. This is an ideal solution for the WDR!

Invoice CENTER for SAP meets all of the WDR's requirements and also includes one of the world's leading document analysis software programs.
Tedious manual data entry, complicated approval processes, unprocessed invoices and reminder charges are a thing of the past.
The fast and simple operation, and the transparency and continuity of the process integrated in the SAP Business Workflow deliver clear time gains and reduce processing costs.

And this benefits everyone.

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Case Study

On air: Invoice CENTER at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk

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