Automated Accounting at MAN

The account­ing depart­ment of MAN Truck & Bus SE received around 345,000 paper invoic­es per year, which were most­ly processed by hand. The employ­ees deal­ing with the invoic­es had to look up infor­ma­tion about cred­i­tors and enter the invoice data need­ed for the down­stream SAP-based work­flow man­u­al­ly in SAP. This result­ed in high costs per processed invoice. In par­al­lel, MAN Truck & Bus SE intend­ed to con­sol­i­date the process­es for incom­ing invoic­es. The process­es need­ed to be opti­mized, stan­dard­ized and made more flex­i­ble at a local lev­el across all the company’s inter­na­tion­al sites to enable the indi­vid­ual stages of invoice pro­cess­ing to be car­ried out at any loca­tion.

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There­fore, MAN Truck & Bus SE planned to put in place a con­sis­tent elec­tron­ic process from the arrival of an invoice all the way to pay­ment and archiv­ing. The goal was to keep the man­u­al effort involved to a min­i­mum, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly improv­ing the qual­i­ty of the ser­vice. A com­mon basis for a ful­ly auto­mat­ed pro­cess­ing should be cre­at­ed for the entire MAN Group.

Independence and Flexibility

MAN Truck & Bus SE chose Insid­er­s‘ Invoice Man­age­ment for SAP solu­tion and imple­ment­ed a high-per­for­mance, con­sis­tent elec­tron­ic process for man­ag­ing incom­ing invoic­es. The stan­dard solu­tion includes a uni­ver­sal cred­i­tor-inde­pen­dent invoice read­er based on intel­li­gent data­base match­ing. smart INVOICE rec­og­nizes the rel­e­vant data regard­less of the dif­fer­ent cred­i­tors’ invoice lay­outs. An indi­vid­ual doc­u­ment def­i­n­i­tion no longer has to be cre­at­ed for new cred­i­tors. Spe­cif­ic account­ing checks, such as ver­i­fy­ing com­pli­ance with nation­al VAT reg­u­la­tions, cre­ate addi­tion­al secu­ri­ty. Fur­ther­more, mas­ter data and vari­able data from SAP is used for qual­i­ty assur­ance pur­pos­es. All the data from incom­ing invoic­es that is need­ed for the busi­ness process is cap­tured auto­mat­i­cal­ly and trans­ferred to the SAP sys­tem, in accor­dance with audit com­pli­ance require­ments, where the data is con­tin­u­ous­ly processed to the point of approval and post­ing.

 

The dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny codes of the var­i­ous sites are auto­mat­i­cal­ly rec­og­nized by smart INVOICE. As a result, no time-con­sum­ing man­u­al pre-sort­ing is required. smart INVOICE then for­wards the invoic­es to the Open Text archiv­ing sys­tem for stor­age. All rel­e­vant data required for auto­mat­ed pro­cess­ing is extract­ed from the invoice doc­u­ments. Invoic­es whose con­tent was not com­plete­ly cap­tured are auto­mat­i­cal­ly for­ward­ed for man­u­al ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Sub­se­quent­ly, smart INVOICE trans­fers the invoice data to SAP for fur­ther auto­mat­ed pro­cess­ing. The inte­gral report­ing func­tion pro­vides MAN Truck & Bus SE with key oper­at­ing data that is used to opti­mize the process even fur­ther.

“With smart INVOICE, we‘ve been able to real­ize con­sis­tent paper­less invoice pro­cess­ing from doc­u­ment arrival to invoice data post­ing. Our entire invoice process has become sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effi­cient. After suc­cess­ful­ly intro­duc­ing the sys­tem in Ger­many, Poland, and Turkey, we have now rolled out the solu­tion in anoth­er 14 coun­tries.”

Zvonko Jur­je­vic, Head of Sub­ledger Account­ing at MAN Truck & Bus SE

International Deployment

MAN Truck & Bus SE has suc­cess­ful­ly rolled out smart INVOICE to many of its sites in a total of 17 coun­tries. The solu­tion is cur­rent­ly in use in Spain, Great Britain, Switzer­land, Slove­nia, Hun­gary, Nor­way, Den­mark, Ger­many, Rus­sia, the Czech Repub­lic, Slo­va­kia, Poland, Turkey, Por­tu­gal, Italy, Aus­tria, and France.

The need for local adap­tions has been accom­mo­dat­ed ful­ly. In Poland, for exam­ple, the invoice pro­cess­ing for select­ed inter­na­tion­al com­pa­ny codes is bun­dled in a Shared Ser­vice Cen­ter. The admin­is­tra­tion of the entire sys­tem is high­ly effi­cient and can be man­aged with only one per­son.

The mul­ti ‑client capa­bil­i­ty of smart INVOICE enables oth­er busi­ness units to be inte­grat­ed flex­i­bly with­in a very short peri­od of time and with lit­tle mod­i­fi­ca­tion. Invoic­es in any lan­guage can be processed, which gives MAN Truck & Bus SE the ide­al solu­tion for its inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion.

Considerable Increases in Efficiency

Cur­rent­ly the MAN Group process­es more than 3 mil­lion paper doc­u­ments auto­mat­i­cal­ly each year using smart INVOICE. The effi­cien­cy of the entire invoice pro­cess­ing sys­tem has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased.

The main ben­e­fits are as fol­lows:

 

  • Pro­cess­ing of the ris­ing busi­ness vol­ume (two-thirds between 2004 and 2012) with­out sig­nif­i­cant addi­tion­al resources
  • Reduc­ing the over­all invoice through­put time to an aver­age of less than 8 days
  • Three months after going live 95% of rel­e­vant fields are rec­og­nized cor­rect­ly
  • Reduc­ing the cost per doc­u­ment from over EUR 10 to less than EUR 3 for the entire process
  • Improv­ing process trans­paren­cy there­by enabling up-to-date invoice sta­tus infor­ma­tion to sup­pli­ers at any­time
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