International Invoice processing at BSH

1.6 mil­lion invoic­es per year – sites through­out the whole of Europe and the rest of the world – dif­fer­ent spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guages – var­i­ous cur­ren­cies and spe­cial coun­try-spe­cif­ic con­sid­er­a­tions. These were the require­ments that BSH Hausgeräte GmbH , Europe’s largest and one of the world’s lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers of house­hold appli­ances, had for mod­ern and sus­tain­able invoice pro­cess­ing. Added to this were the well-known prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with pro­cess­ing invoic­es in the con­ven­tion­al way.
At BSH, most invoic­es had pre­vi­ous­ly been cap­tured man­u­al­ly, result­ing in an enor­mous amount of work, high sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to errors, inad­e­quate data qual­i­ty and incom­plete invoice infor­ma­tion for down­stream process­es. In short, a low lev­el of effi­cien­cy at the very begin­ning of the invoice process, at all nation­al sub­sidiary sites through­out the world.

“Pro­cess­ing inter­na­tion­al invoic­es with a stan­dard prod­uct – this is what impressed us about Insid­ers from the very begin­ning. Today, we process our incom­ing invoic­es in more than 30 inter­na­tion­al sub­sidiaries using Invoice Man­age­ment from Insid­ers – high­ly effi­cient­ly and con­ve­nient­ly.”

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Markus Schwein­berg­er, Head of Account­ing Stan­dards and Prin­ci­ples, BSH Hausgeräte GmbH

SIIM – Standardized Incoming Invoice Management

The go-ahead for the SIIM (Stan­dard­ized Incom­ing Invoice Man­age­ment) project at BSH was there­fore giv­en. The pri­ma­ry aim was to stan­dard­ize the pro­cess­ing of incom­ing invoic­es with an auto­mat­ic, paper­less process through­out the entire com­pa­ny and at all inter­na­tion­al sites.

The com­pa­ny chose the Invoice Man­age­ment solu­tion from Insid­ers, with the smart INVOICE TABLE stan­dard prod­uct. At BSH, the uni­ver­sal, cred­i­tor-inde­pen­dent invoice read­er extracts head­er and foot­er data and the impor­tant item data from all incom­ing invoic­es. Numer­ous log­i­cal checks and intel­li­gent data­base match­ing pro­ce­dures ensure that the extract­ed invoice infor­ma­tion is of a high qual­i­ty. A stan­dard inter­face then trans­fers the data to the down­stream work­flow.

Faster and more Efficient Invoice Process

From the very begin­ning, the key cri­te­ri­on for the suc­cess of the project was a very short invoice through­put time. Now, with FI invoic­es (invoic­es with­out an order ref­er­ence), infor­ma­tion about the approver of the invoice who has respon­si­bil­i­ty with­in the work­flow is also already added when the invoice is cap­tured using smart INVOICE TABLE. In this way, the invoice can be auto­mat­i­cal­ly for­ward­ed to the employ­ee respon­si­ble when it is trans­ferred to SAP. There is no longer any need for sub­se­quent time-con­sum­ing assign­ment in the work­flow and the invoice can be checked, approved and post­ed imme­di­ate­ly. The dan­ger of los­ing dis­counts is a thing of the past.

At the same time, the account asso­ci­a­tions for FI invoic­es are already cap­tured in smart INVOICE TABLE. If required, the invoice line items are bro­ken down and assigned to the cor­rect imper­son­al accounts. This also saves BSH time spent han­dling the invoice in sub­se­quent book­keep­ing steps and speeds up the entire process.

International Roll-out

Today, BSH process­es more than 1,600,000 invoic­es every year via all its nation­al sub­sidiaries using the Insid­ers solu­tion. After start-up in Ger­many and Spain, the solu­tion was launched in the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries of Swe­den, Nor­way, Fin­land and Den­mark, plus the Baltic region with Esto­nia, Latvia, and Lithua­nia. They were fol­lowed by Poland, Turkey, Rus­sia, Chi­na, India, Sin­ga­pore and South Africa, among oth­ers. In between, the Insid­ers prod­ucts are in use at BSH in over 30 coun­tries.

The solution’s sub­sys­tem capa­bil­i­ty in par­tic­u­lar ensures that it can be deployed inter­na­tion­al­ly. This makes it pos­si­ble to inte­grate oth­er nation­al sub­sidiaries with­out a great deal of admin­is­tra­tive work. BSH is cur­rent­ly in the test phase for use in Malaysia.

The solution’s lan­guage inde­pen­dence is of great ben­e­fit to BSH in this con­text. For exam­ple, all the char­ac­ters and cur­ren­cies for the var­i­ous coun­tries are already includ­ed in the stan­dard prod­uct. Coun­try-spe­cif­ic require­ments, e.g. check­ing for VAT com­pli­ance, meet all of BSH’s needs. And what is more, to ensure that order cor­re­la­tion also works out­side of the Euro zone, two cur­ren­cies are extract­ed if required, i.e. the order cur­ren­cy and the nation­al cur­ren­cy.

 

Intelligent Process Controlling

Com­pre­hen­sive con­trol­ling allows to mon­i­tor and con­trol the entire invoice process and sup­ports BSH when imple­ment­ing opti­miza­tions while the sys­tem is run­ning. Clear and intu­itive graph­i­cal reports pro­vide com­plete, trans­par­ent and con­stant­ly up-to-date infor­ma­tion about the pro­cess­ing pro­ce­dure. Data con­cern­ing the invoice pro­cess­ing per­for­mance is there­fore always avail­able and BSH employ­ees can sup­ply infor­ma­tion about the sta­tus of all invoic­es at any time.

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