Boundless efficiency in accounting

Holistic approach and process integration in a company with nine business units and locations in more than 40 countries? ContiTech, the world's leading supplier of rubber and plastic products, is setting an example:

The Continental division, which has 185 locations in 44 countries, has made its processes for processing incoming invoices more efficient and transparent across the board - with the help of Tangro IM software, which is used across many different areas.

By consistently automating the processes from capturing to checking to posting incoming invoices in SAP, document runtimes were reduced and transparency and traceability were significantly improved.

"Tangro automatically recognizes invoice content so that data no longer needs to be entered manually, only briefly cross-checked"

explains Frank Sündermann, head of IT Business Systems at ContiTech.

"At the same time, we have an overview of all invoices. We know where the documents are currently for approval and can follow the whole process."

ContiTech develops and produces components and systems for the machine and plant engineering, mining and automotive industries, among others. The accounts payable departments of the individual divisions receive a flood of invoices every day that have to be entered and posted in SAP.

The manual processing of these documents was enormously time-consuming - among other things, because the documents had to pass through many stations and be transferred from one place to another: from the mailrooms of the individual locations to the main office for recording, from there back the same way again for checking and factual and technical countersignature, and finally again to the main office to be scanned and electronically archived. This was an enormous time-consuming process, which was also accompanied by a lack of transparency.

Holistic approach as a big plus

This less than satisfactory situation gave rise to the desire for a solution for automated invoice processing. The choice fell on Tangro IM and thus on a compact software that captures invoice content electronically, makes the document image immediately available as a digital image and processes all approvals electronically. As a special advantage, Tangro is SAP-embedded and thus offers full integration with the SAP system - without interface problems.

This holistic approach brings benefits for IT and users:

"Tangro embeds itself completely into our system environment technologically. We don't have to exchange data with upstream systems, as is the case with other systems."

says Sündermann.

"From an IT perspective, Tangro is thus characterized by particularly simple handling. We have a good overview of what is required on the technological side and can maintain and control Tangro with little effort."

But the full embedding in SAP also offers advantages on the user side.

"Because Tangro is SAP-embedded".

Sündermann continues,

"users will find the same interfaces for invoice processing that they are already familiar with from their daily work with the SAP system. The SAP GUI makes the Tangro solution particularly easy to handle from the user's point of view."

With this convincing concept, Tangro has established itself at ContiTech as the software for processing incoming invoices. The software is already in use at 20 locations in Europe and Central America, and more are to follow soon.

"With Tangro, we have succeeded in deploying a product with a uniform, standardized solution approach across many companies while sharing an infrastructure"

says Sündermann.

All invoice types

ContiTech uses Tangro to process all invoice types, i.e. invoices from direct and indirect purchasing as well as documents with and without purchase order references. The volume now amounts to 300,000 processed documents per year, which are received either by mail on paper or as PDFs by e-mail.

At the moment, the ratio is still 50:50, but the trend is increasingly toward e-mail processing - a development that ContiTech welcomes because it eliminates the intermediate scanning step and thus speeds up processing even further.

In any case, Tangro automatically recognizes the relevant invoice content. On the one hand, this includes vendor data such as the supplier's address and bank details, as well as all header data such as invoice number, invoice date and gross invoice amount. In the case of purchase order-related invoices, the purchase order is also drawn on the basis of the delivery bill and the goods receipt is set.

The invoice receipt book provides a complete overview of all received invoices and their status. Here, clerks can specifically check which invoices can be posted directly, where post-processing is required, and which documents are in the workflow for release.

This ensures greater clarity throughout the entire process. And it does so throughout the company, since accounting ledgers can also be called up across company codes.

"With Tangro, we have achieved a very high level of transparency"

says Sündermann,

"and that's across the board."

This alone results in a shorter processing time per document. In addition, the processing time has been reduced due to the elimination of manual data entry.

"ContiTech saves an average of half a minute per document through automated invoice processing. This has brought the processing time down to three minutes."

Sündermann quantifies the success.

Process requirements

Another important factor for greater efficiency in invoice processing is the electronic handling of approval processes. No more circulation of paper documents, no more annoying phone calls afterwards when approvals are missing.

The entire process is now digitized and automated, taking into account the company-specific, site-related requirements. In this way, Tangro fully maps all approval stages that are required at ContiTech for factual and technical invoice verification.

For example, a two-stage workflow with factual review in the first stage and approval in the second. The process is fully automated here and has a stored planning duration.

This also increases process reliability, because as soon as the duration is exceeded, employees immediately receive a warning and can take countermeasures.

Even after approval, the electronic workflows offer further advantages. For example, all processes are documented in the workflow log and are therefore quickly and easily traceable for inquiries and searches. Likewise, all related documents can be found again immediately because Tangro automatically links the documents to the business transaction in SAP. Holism characterizes the solution in this respect as well.