Automated Invoice Forms Processing Comes of Age
Cut expenses associated with data entry by 60%

INSIDE

Case Study: IFB, an ING Bank Group Company

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IFB Automates Invoice Processing with Papyrus Capture

New Papyrus system reduces labour cost for data entry and improves throughput and processing time.

IFB is jointly owned by ING and KBC and has more than 40 years experience of offering leading factoring services to companies in ­Belgium and other countries.

• The Business
Factoring banks such as IFB collect payments on behalf of their customers against invoices raised by those customers – often a difficult and time-consuming activity for all sizes of business. They also provide credit to customers by releasing a large proportion of the sums invoiced up front, before payment has been collected from creditors. Typical factoring banks deal with large volumes of invoices, many of relatively low value, from many different clients. Consequently, invoices are received in many different layouts.

IFB processes several thousand invoices every day on behalf of hundreds of clients. In addition, IFB has a large customer base operating outside its home market in Belgium. Consequently, invoices in French, Dutch, English, German and Spanish must all be processed.

• Automating Forms Scanning and Data Capture
Before the payment collection process can be initiated and managed, data held on the invoices received from customers needs to be input. At IFB, with the exception of invoices already in electronic form, data was entered manually - a labor-intensive and error-prone process.

IFB was looking for a new system that would deliver a very high level of automation for invoice capture and the assignment of indexes ready for legally-required archiving and further processing of the inbound documents.

IFB has experienced rapid recent growth in its business. The goal was for the new system to handle significantly higher volumes of invoices without increased headcount.

The integration between the new capture system and the core IFB applications and the archive needed to be reliable and easy to implement. Existing IFB business processes also needed to integrate smoothly with the new system.

• The Vendor Selection Criteria
IFB chose a Papyrus Capture solution from ISIS after a thorough selection process. IFB were impressed by the flexibility offered by the Papyrus architecture and its ability to easily integrate with existing applications and business processes. The Papyrus implementation met all the IFB requirements and expectations.

Papyrus Capture offers two primary ways of classifying document types and extracting data. In the first method the system is taught about form layouts that would be expected from a given customer in so-called Template Definitions. This method works very reliably and quickly and would be appropriate for processing invoices from larger customers. More than 90% of the data fields can be accurately extracted using this approach.

• FreeForm®
The second method uses the sophisticated Papyrus FreeForm® tools that can reliably extract invoice data where the physical layout of the invoice is unknown. This combination of technologies working in concert gives the customer the ultimate choice in balancing performance, results and set-up and system training time. When a particular IFB customer grows then the system can be trained to recognize their specific form layout.

• A Graphical Design Tool
Papyrus Capture offers self-learning features and easy-to-use graphical design and analysis tools that allow extraction and classification rules to be easily tuned and improved.

IFB defined more than 30 data fields that might be present in an invoice. The system searches for each of these fields and extracts the data if the specific field is present in that invoice. Where the contents of an identified field can not be determined with sufficient confidence then a manual completion process is followed.

• Manual Correction of Rejected Fields
Papyrus Capture makes manual correction or completion of rejected fields as easy and error-free as possible by giving the ability to present only the necessary and relevant information required to the end user (completion masks). Papyrus customers have complete flexibility over how and what to present to end users for manual completion or routine quality assurance verification. Typically the user will use a standard Web browser to access the system through Papyrus WebPortal.

Once a Papyrus system is set up, the Papyrus Objects infrastructure allows changes and new functionality to be added extremely quickly and with minimal effort and cost.

Any document capture system must integrate easily with other applications, both to easily use the data extracted by the system but also to improve the accuracy of the document recognition process by cross-validation. Papyrus’ ability to cleanly integrate with other applications is a key strength.

• Archiving
In IFB’s case extracted data is passed to their core system via XML files, and the images of the scanned invoices are passed as TIFF files, together with indexes, for archiving.

IFB has met its primary goal of processing more transactions without increasing headcount and has capacity left over to handle future growth.