‘The company relies on digitalised, automated invoice processing.’
EKZ relies on automated invoice receipt from Conextrade. Swisscom's innovative Conextrade solution has enabled it to automate invoice processing.
Success Story Electricity plant of the canton of zurich 4 min.
- Company: Electricity plant of the canton of zurich (EKZ)
- Industry: Energy
- Automated invoice processing
- Digitisation
Moving from paper, towards automated invoice receipt
Following significant growth of EKZ Group at home and abroad, the number of accounts payable invoices rose to around 110,000 per year. The goal was to move away from paper and towards an efficient, digital, automated and environmentally friendly solution. Conextrade offers this through automated invoice receipt.
Thomas Altenburger, Head of the Finance & Accounting department, had the creditor processes and the digitisation possibilities analysed. The result was that very significant optimisation potential existed. EKZ then decided to work with external professional providers in order to digitise the process. The company has been using "E-invoicing" since 2008 and at that time already received 30% of incoming invoices as "E-invoicing" instead of paper. The incoming paper invoices were scanned and processed by EKZ itself. Over time, however, there were always new challenges. The ageing hardware, the need for a back-up scanner for emergencies and software updates posed challenges for EKZ. The situation became untenable and a suitable solution had to be found. Instead of a time-consuming and costly upgrade of the scanners, the OCR software and the workflow, Thomas Altenburger looked for a more efficient and economical solution.
Efficiency, structure and cost advantages
EKZ’s management opted for the "Scanning2E-Invoicing" service from Conextrade for good reasons: the service was able to cover all of EKZ’s requirements and had the best price/performance ratio. Furthermore, EKZ already had a productive interface to Conextrade.
This enabled EKZ to outsource the entire paper process from the PO box to the work preparation, the OCR process and the post processing, to Conextrade. The project was launched in autumn 2013. EKZ went live at the beginning of 2014. In 2015, a further step was added to the process with the "PDF2E-Invoicing" service. This was done in order to achieve a faster supplier roll-out in the SME sector. “With Conextrade's innovative solution, we were able to digitise our "E-Invoicing" & "Scanning2E-Invoicing" processes and make them significantly more efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly," says Thomas Altenburger with conviction.