Fulfilling all customer needs – with Insiders and smart INVOICE

Markant, the ser­vice cen­ter in the B2B pay­ment sec­tor, process­es over six mil­lion receipts a year for more than 200 retail and trad­ing com­pa­nies. Thanks to smart INVOICE, Markant can now respond even bet­ter to the spe­cial wish­es and needs of its cus­tomers — indi­vid­u­al­ly, flex­i­bly, scal­ably and, of course, pow­ered by AI.

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

The mar­ket-proven Insid­ers solu­tion smart INVOICE enables the Markant Group to achieve the high­est qual­i­ty and valid­i­ty in the man­age­ment of pay­ment flows for its cus­tomers. More than 200 retail com­pa­nies and around 15,000 indus­tri­al part­ners work with Markant in the Pay­ment Ser­vices divi­sion. The pay­ment ser­vice provider process­es more than six mil­lion receipts per year, some­times with hun­dreds of pages per doc­u­ment.

The mul­ti­tude of cus­tomers and large num­ber of indus­try part­ners who issue invoic­es to the trad­ing com­pa­nies results in an enor­mous vari­ety of lay­outs and for­mats for the incom­ing doc­u­ments. In addi­tion, each cus­tomer usu­al­ly has dif­fer­ent require­ments with regard to the fields to be read. In addi­tion to stan­dard manda­to­ry fields such as doc­u­ment num­ber or doc­u­ment date, some cus­tomers expect infor­ma­tion and log­ic to be read that is not stan­dard and can­not be eas­i­ly read by every OCR. Meet­ing these indi­vid­ual cus­tomer require­ments ade­quate­ly is a major chal­lenge for Markant.

In some cas­es, Markant han­dles all pay­ment trans­ac­tions between sup­pli­ers and retail­ers for its cus­tomers in the con­tract busi­ness. Here too, there are enor­mous dif­fer­ences in the qual­i­ty of the doc­u­ments and there­fore spe­cial require­ments for OCR.

The busi­ness group was there­fore look­ing for a reli­able solu­tion that not only deliv­ers the high­est qual­i­ty and can react flex­i­bly to changes, but also enables indi­vid­ual adap­ta­tions.

“We need both: the high­est pos­si­ble degree of automa­tion and the high­est qual­i­ty. This is the only way we can effi­cient­ly offer our cus­tomers indi­vid­ual ser­vice with the enor­mous vol­umes of doc­u­ments”

, says Torsten Bre­itkreuz, Head of Inter­na­tion­al Projects at Markant, sum­ma­riz­ing the require­ments. “With smart INVOICE from Insid­ers, we get all this and use AI as an enabler for inno­va­tion.”

The AI-sup­port­ed two-stage solu­tion for auto­mat­ed invoice pro­cess­ing achieves top scores for doc­u­ment read­ing qual­i­ty, per­for­mance and user sat­is­fac­tion. Users in post-pro­cess­ing praise the ergonom­ics of smart INVOICE, which also facil­i­tates the onboard­ing of new employ­ees at Markant. Thanks to machine learn­ing, man­u­al activ­i­ties for new cus­tomers can also be quick­ly reduced to a min­i­mum.

While the ini­tial aim was sim­ply to replace man­u­al data entry, the main focus was lat­er on increas­ing the lev­el of automa­tion while main­tain­ing the high­est qual­i­ty. Today, Markant is par­tic­u­lar­ly focused on the scal­a­bil­i­ty of the solu­tion in order to cope with increas­ing inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion.

For Markant, smart INVOICE is not just a sim­ple doc­u­ment read­ing sys­tem, but an entire work­flow with var­i­ous com­po­nents.

 “It is a great advan­tage for us that we can expand smart INVOICE indi­vid­u­al­ly. Some­times, we have to check some things more specif­i­cal­ly or in a spe­cial envi­ron­ment in order to real­ly read out 100% valid data. Here we work very close­ly and in part­ner­ship with Insid­ers, who respond very flex­i­bly to our indi­vid­ual require­ments”

‚ explains Frank Groß, Prod­uct Own­er Digi­Doc Ser­vices / Archive Process­es at Markant.

By work­ing close­ly with the Insid­ers team, Markant ben­e­fits from all the advan­tages of a Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­er with the cor­re­spond­ing prox­im­i­ty, direct access to prod­uct own­ers and devel­op­ers of the prod­uct as well as a high lev­el of con­ti­nu­ity in the peo­ple respon­si­ble.

Enthu­si­as­tic about the solu­tion, Markant also uses smart INVOICE inter­nal­ly for its own P2P process­es. The oth­er Insid­ers prod­ucts are also of strate­gic inter­est to Markant, as cus­tomers are increas­ing­ly request­ing the eval­u­a­tion of oth­er doc­u­ment types such as deliv­ery bills or reminders.