BASF automates global P2P process in the Cloud

BASF short­ens pro­cess­ing time for 3.5 mil­lion incom­ing invoic­es per year by 50 per­cent and reduces effort by 40 FTE thanks to AI. smart INVOICE excels in detailed doc­u­ment read­ing, excel­lent data qual­i­ty, deep val­i­da­tion, and low main­te­nance effort.

Thank you for read­ing this post, don’t for­get to sub­scribe!

Insid­ers imple­ment­ed the smart INVOICE solu­tion for BASF world­wide. This has enabled the chem­i­cal com­pa­ny to auto­mate the purchase-to-pay(P2P) process for accounts payable pro­cess­ing to a much greater extent and fur­ther improve its qual­i­ty. Over­all, automa­tion with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has more than halved invoice pro­cess­ing time and saved 40 full-time equiv­a­lents (FTE) of effort.

Every year, BASF receives around 3.5 mil­lion doc­u­ments with a total vol­ume of about 10 mil­lion pages from more than 80 coun­tries. An exten­sive mar­ket review led the com­pa­ny to Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies’ smart INVOICE solu­tion as a cloud ser­vice. In select­ing a new solu­tion, it was essen­tial for BASF to use state-of-the-art AI for the best pos­si­ble data extrac­tion and to enable rapid roll­out and easy scal­ing with cloud ser­vices. Addi­tion­al­ly, ful­ly auto­mat­ed detailed doc­u­ment read­ing and val­i­da­tion were required for a holis­tic increase in the degree of automa­tion across the entire process chain.

“Our process was already large­ly opti­mized in terms of its flow. It was obvi­ous that to increase effi­cien­cy fur­ther, we would have to rely on new tech­nolo­gies from arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to achieve more automa­tion”

says Rita Lam­pa­sona-Hor­nung, Head of Accounts Payable EMEA at BASF. “The intel­li­gent cloud ser­vices from Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies – specif­i­cal­ly smart INVOICE for invoice pro­cess­ing – quick­ly con­vinced us with their inno­v­a­tive con­cept and out­stand­ing per­for­mance.”

With year-end clos­ing as a fixed dead­line, the design, plan­ning, imple­men­ta­tion, and glob­al roll­out of the Insid­ers solu­tion had to be ful­ly com­plet­ed with­in just ten months. Today, around 400 employ­ees at BASF’s three ser­vice hubs world­wide are work­ing with this solu­tion. The doc­u­ment read­ing process has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved in terms of the scope and qual­i­ty of the data, which is reflect­ed in a high pro­por­tion of ful­ly auto­mat­ed read and ver­i­fied doc­u­ments. This lev­el of qual­i­ty has also led to a sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved ratio of doc­u­ments with ful­ly auto­mat­ic post­ing in SAP. Using the smart ACT busi­ness ana­lyt­ics tool inte­grat­ed into the solu­tion, BASF can eval­u­ate exten­sive usage data in var­i­ous lev­els of detail and so are able to improve the entire process in a data-dri­ven man­ner con­tin­u­ous­ly.

BASF is so con­vinced of the per­for­mance of Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies’ cloud ser­vices that it is already pilot­ing oth­er appli­ca­tion areas in the P2P process, such as order con­fir­ma­tion pro­cess­ing and advanced ship­ping noti­fi­ca­tions.

Read the detailed project report now!