The question, the solution - Transform APTM from Bottomline Technologies
Every company has to deal with Accounts Payable Processes and the processing of invoices. Every company knows this is a time-consuming and administrative task that needs to be performed accurately. Maarten Kerssen, Financial Controller at Danone has drawn up the balance. It was essential for Danone to automate the procurement processes as much as possible. It is important for the business that invoices are filed immediately and that everyone can always find back all the documents in the same place.

The added value of an automated process
An automated system works better than a ring binder. ‘The authorization process of the invoices was not working correctly at Danone’, says Maarten Kerssens, ‘we kept the originals here and copies were made and put away everywhere. At this moment there are 60 people involved in the approval process. This makes you lose the overview. The whole process took too much of our time and money and became less clear and less transparent. A VAT declaration has to be filled in as soon as possible, but the process that makes this possible became a challenge. It than is easy to make up a business case’.

The Business Case
Another justification for the business case was the fact that many different departments throughout Europe also invoice each other mutually. There are 18.000 invoices that need to be processed & checked, a manual process is therefore not ideal. Furthermore different people from different locations are involved in the approval processes. Those processes took a lot of time and were also not transparent enough.  At a given moment suppliers started asking for their payment. Maarten saw only one solution: ‘Scanning of the invoices to have the back office process running as streamlined and as fast as possible’.

The Danone project
When the final decision was made and the management approved, the new project it was a fact. An integrated Oracle JD Edwards scanning solution based on Formscape would come. The Accounts Payable processes of Danone would become completely automated. Maarten Kerssen was looking for a  partner that could guide them the best way possible during this project. He chose Steltix. They were capable of building an interface between Formscape (the scanning software) and JD Edwards (the ERP system that Danone uses and in which all the invoices are stored). With Formscape you can make scanned invoices visible, they are stored in your system and all steps (authorizations) are regulated and can always be found.

The project - the requirements and the steps
All requirements and whishes of the financial department were inventoried and gathered.  Off course these have also been matched with the background of the technical infrastructure. One of the important points was that several approval processes were run parallel.  Furthermore, they needed to have a good overview with the help of a list, to see which invoices were still awaiting approval. All these requirements and insights became clear during the project and needed to be implemented in the new (to be created) system.

In collaboration with Steltix, Danone has realized this project within four and a half months. Everything has been tested thoroughly and people have been trained. There was an issue list on operational area, but this has been solved professionally together with Steltix. Some of these issues were related to the source codes of JD Edwards of Bottom line that had not been released. Scanning patterns were build for the most common suppliers to recognize the supplier invoices. Steltix has done a lot to solve all issues, and to make everything work correctly. After the go live the department Accounts Payable has, while working with the system, sophisticated it even more. The result is a streamlined and automated process that gains time and also saves money.