Mechan Groep

Mechan Groep is headquartered in Achterveld in the Netherlands and has a subsidiary in Gembloux, Belgium. Mechan Groep is a supplier of world-leading brands in the tractor and agricultural equipment sector and has currently 200 employees.

About the Project

The Challenge

An incoming invoice has to pass through many hands. From the moment it lands in the finance department’s inbox to the moment it is created in the system, approved and paid. That is, if the process is manual. With 15,000 incoming invoices per year, the manual process of handling invoices had become too great - a challenge for the Dutch Mechan Groep, who supply world-leading brands in the tractor and agricultural equipment sector. The company was faced either with employing more resources to handle routine invoice management or with transferring operation to software robots to automate and streamline the task.

The challenge facing Mechan Groep was the fact that the resources for invoice creation and subsequent error detection and correction had become too cost-intensive. Invoices have many different values, which need to be registered in the ERP system and categorized according to account number and cost centers. Finally, all information must be validated before the invoice is ready for payment. This way, an invoice is dealt with manually from start to finish.

On a strategic level Mechan Groep wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on routine tasks and instead give the staff more meaningful tasks. For this objective, Mechan Groep settled on it.capture as-a-service from NTT DATA Business Solutions – an automated, cognitive technology-based solution that can be integrated with any ERP system.

“This solution fits our business perfectly. We don’t personally have to handle, host and run the solution or spend time creating invoices in the ERP system. All we have to do is focus solely on controlling our master data to prevent errors from occurring in the automated process, and on validating the invoices prior to payment”.

Time Saving of 60%

it.capture as-a-service is based on robot software and artificial intelligence. All values in the invoice are automatically recorded and categorized in Mechan’s SAP system. The supplier emails the invoice as an attachment. NTT DATA Business Solutions’ software then takes care of the administrative process and makes the invoice ready for payment. With artificial intelligence, the software can understand data connections and acquire more knowledge as more documents are recorded.

“Using it.capture as-a-service we have saved 60% of the time we used to spend on creating invoices. We have also achieved a virtually zero error rate. The solution helps professionalize our processes”.

Focus on Master Data

The solution is available in three versions, either as on-premise, cloud or as-a-service. Instead of installing the solution in-house or working on it themselves in a cloud version, Mechan Groep found it both easier and cheaper to have NTT DATA Business Solutions handle, upgrade and operate the solution as-a-service.

Now Mechan Groep are involved solely in the final validation and payment. According to Juliette Van Vaalen, one of the major benefits of the solution is that it forces Mechan Groep to decide on what master data should form the basis for recording the invoices and then keep track of them. A lot of errors can easily occur in the recording process if the invoices are not recorded uniformly and based on the same values. Mechan Groep chose to link invoices to IBAN number rather than vendor. This has led to a significant reduction in the rate of errors.

“I would recommend this solution to everybody. It helps you prevent problems and saves you a lot of time. Most importantly, it helps you manage your master data from the start”.

Benefits

• No manual labor or repetitive work
• Elimination of manual errors
• Experts maintain the system
• A simple price per document
• No hosting costs, no license fees, no updating costs
• The more documents processed, the better output generated
• Time savings of 60%

Results From the Very First Day

Mechan Groep received advice and help from NTT DATA Business Solutions, who are particularly skilled in the field and tackled the project effortlessly and professionally.

“I’m extremely enthusiastic not only about the solution, but also about the cooperation. NTT DATA Business Solutions was determined to guarantee us an efficient solution, and we have great confidence in them. We got help the moment it was required, and they answered all our questions thoroughly. We commissioned the solution in June 2017, and it yielded results from the very first day”.