With a high volume of invoices (over 1,000 supplier invoices received per day), Europ Assistance Portugal decided to seek ways to streamline and optimize the entire process of managing and processing supplier and customer invoices.
Europ Assistance is a leading company in Portugal in the Assistance market, being present in the Portuguese market since 1993 and having as main clients some of the largest insurance companies at a national level. Contributing to this leadership position are, not only the quality and efficiency of services provided, but also the permanent innovation.
Europ Assistance (part of the Generali Group) has been an important reference for more than 55 years and the world leader in the Travel Assistance and Insurance business in Europe, South America, Asia and South Africa.
THE SOLUTION
To meet this challenge, the company adopted a Filedoc solution with the aim of “dematerializing and automating the entire invoice management process”, which contemplates an integration of its work processes/workflows with scanning and automatic capture of information (OCR), performing a full integration with the different pre-existing ERP’s.
Europ Assistance was thus able to fully dematerialize the invoice approval process, scanning more than 1,000 supplier invoices per day, with OCR automation, as well as automatically classifying and indexing them based on predefined rules and fields. Approvals are paperless, using workflow automation, with digital certificates and, of course, with associated rules and alerts.
Using Filedoc API, the application integrates with the various software that the company uses: Sage, PIE, ERP.
To the existing reports in the application, which allow to control all the information, Europ Assistance required several reports tailored to its needs, in order to have all the information it understood easily accessible at any time.
Some details of the process as implemented:
- Dematerialization – This is achieved through the mass collection and scanning of invoices, the latter being performed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which allows the key data of the documents to be automatically identified (Customer and Supplier TIN, Values, and other relevant information). In cases where the entity does not exist yet, it is automatically created, always refusing the duplication of entities;
- Filing – After the dematerialization process, follows the phase of filing in folders and by metadata;
- Automation of the entire invoice management process – The automation of the invoice management process includes the validation of the extracted values and their correct calculation, and, as already mentioned, the identification of suppliers and customers is done via the VAT field. The workflows are also responsible for the management of opinions and dispatches and for the approval of invoices and payment deadlines, having rules that depend, for example, on the type of supplier or insurance company in question;
- Integration – Through webservices, the automatic loading of documents to the ERP’s and to the different existing payment systems is done;
- Control – Besides the automation of information flows, and the inherent advantages already mentioned, the company now has important tools that allow a strict control over response and payment deadlines (number of working days), employee/department performance, and possible bottlenecks in the information flows related to invoice management.
The project fully achieved the goals set by Europ Assistance, and it is worth highlighting its satisfaction with Filedoc software and with the Implementation Team.