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Bertelsmann Global Business Services adopts AI innovation to automate invoice processing
Customer Success Stories
Bertelsmann Global Business Services (GBS) is a service unit within the Corporate division of Bertelsmann. It provides comprehensive services for core finance and business processes to approximately 400 customers in 30 countries from all divisions and solution groups.
Creating future-oriented shared service center
Constantly raising the bar
Bertelsmann Global Business Services (GBS) is a service unit within the Corporate division of Bertelsmann. It provides comprehensive services for core finance and business processes to approximately 400 customers in 30 countries from all divisions and solution groups.
With about 380 employees located in Germany, the US, and the UK, the company ensures that finance and business processes are handled efficiently. It develops innovative digital solutions and customer-oriented services in various areas such as accounting, financial statements, controlling, reporting, materials management, procurement, and invoicing. The offering is modular and includes consulting services, the provision of process and system solutions, and the operational handling of business processes.
Through this continuously expanding services portfolio the company strives to meet the needs of its customers and contribute to the success of Bertelsmann and its Group companies.
“Clients look to us for best practice and innovation,” said Carsten Waschkowitz, Managing Director for Bertelsmann Global Business Services GmbH. “So, we’re constantly growing our digital capabilities and service offer to raise the quality and efficiency bar.”
A key focus for innovation was invoice handling, a process reliant on document scanning using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This traditional approach was limited in terms of data capture accuracy and automation. So, staff would often have to manually add correct general ledger accounts and cost element codes and such like. Keen to explore the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) the company was looking for a solution offering to better fit with its SAP technology stack.
“OCR scanning limitations meant our teams regularly had to conduct time-consuming investigations and manual re-work. When you are handling over 40,000 invoices a month that’s a lot of unnecessary effort and cost.”
Fully managed service delivery
Combining Iron Mountain® and Hypatos digital capabilities the new AI-based cloud solution is delivered as a fully managed service. The process starts for the remaining physical invoices in the Iron Mountain Digital Mailroom in Berlin where specialists sort, register and scan paper-based invoices received from GBS clients.
Once converted into PDF and combined with e-invoice workloads, the system automates all stages of document processing. This includes classification, supplier and tax validation, extraction, coding, content enrichment and verification, where details are checked against external databases. Crucially, it uses cognitive understanding of document content and comparing it with historic invoicing coding and verification behaviours. The digital records are then forwarded for approval (if they successfully pass) or are routed to staff member (if they are flagged as queries). All data is encrypted at rest and during transmission across a secure network. Customer service and technical support is provided by Hypatos. Efficiency and accuracy improvements
Using that AI-based approach has enabled the invoice handling process to be further automated.
“We’ve made a good start but think there’s still room to improve efficiency and accuracy, especially in coding prediction for invoices without purchase orders to get to the next level of automation,” concluded Carsten Waschkowitz.
“The big difference with AI-powered document processing is we’re now able to train the system models and experience the improvements.”
Featured services & solutions
Industry
Business Process Outsourcing
Challenge
Bertelsmann GBS wanted a better performing OCR solution to improve invoice handling with higher efficiency and accuracy.
Solution
Delivered as a fully managed service, the new solution combines Iron Mountain digital mailroom and scanning capabilities with Hypatos AIpowered document processing.
Value
- 40,000+ client invoices handled each month
- 80% process automation achieved
- 95% capturing accuracy
- Improvements through inbuilt training capability
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