KHS AG

KHS AG, Dortmund, the internationally operating manufacturer of filling and packaging systems for the beverage, food and non-food industries, was created in 1993 from the merger of Holstein & Kappert AG, Dortmund, which was established in 1868, and Seitz-Werke GmbH, later SEN AG, Bad Kreuznach, which was established in 1887. The company is a 100% subsidiary of Klöckner-Werke AG. KHS is a global market leader and preferred supplier to the packaging industry, with a focus on beverage applications and complete systems.

Dortmund company KHS AG has set out to optimize and automate invoice processing with intelligent business process management. As a successful manufacturer of filling and packaging systems, KHS has a high volume of invoices which have to be processed quickly and reliably. With 900 to 1,100 invoices arriving daily, a great deal of manual data entry work was required in the past. This was very time-consuming and resulted in a high error rate.

Nowadays, an invoice is automatically entered immediately after successful data reconciliation. Invoices which are still unresolved are automatically sent to the inboxes of the responsible case handlers on the basis of the classification. A few clicks or entries in a special two-part screen are all that is required for verification. The image is displayed on the right and the booking data on the left; fields which are unrecognised or deviating are clearly marked in red.

Anyone at KHS can now use the workflow to quickly and easily check an invoice. "This saves us having to send in-house mail between the locations," says Anja Adam, head of accounts payable at KHS, "and increases the motivation to process the transaction promptly."

As a long-standing service provider for KHS, partner bpi solutions implemented the solution at the six German KHS locations in just four months. "This was done in record time, and was only possible because of the outstanding cooperation," comments Rüdiger Wigger, project manager at KHS. The detection rates are currently 98 percent at field level. "A value that we are delighted with," says the SAP specialist.

The overall solution which has been implemented consists of the core components inboxx hyparchiv for GDPdU-compliant storage of the images and data, MR.KNOW – BPM (formerly BPM inspire) for the workflow, smartFIX from Insiders Technologies for free-form classification and extraction and components from bpi solutions such as ScanMagic for high-volume scanning and the convenient user interface.

This solution impressed project manager Rüdiger Wigger because it "makes early entry possible, and has a very favourable price-performance ratio." Particularly the workflow "is a lean, effective solution, so we have made a conscious decision not to use a SAP Business Workflow," he adds.