ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices Transforms Sportina Group’s Invoice Processing

Customer Overview

Name	Sportina Group
Headquarters	Southeast Europe
Industry	Retail
Web	https://sportina.group

Partners Overview

Name	SOLUMA
Industry	Full service data capture solution provider
Web	www.soluma.eu

Name	KONICA MINOLTA
Industry	Business solutions provider
Web	www.konicaminolta.si

Challenge

Optimize the process for incoming invoices

Solution

Implemented a scalable and efﬁcient data capture solution based on ABBYY FlexiCapture

Results

Client reduced invoice processing time by half and eliminated the need for staff to manually input data

Sportina Group is a fashion apparel company and trusted franchise representing more than 50 global brands in more than 340 stores across Southeast Europe. Located in major cities throughout the region, its stores cater to the fashion needs of customers with over 6,500 square feet (2,000 square meters) of selling floor space in each unit.

Challenge

Sportina faced many challenges in managing its invoices with over 250,000 invoices received annually and processed manually and/or through EDI integration with suppliers. The process took significant time that resulted in a high margin for error due to human interaction and manual data entry into its ERP system.

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Solution

Sportina’s internal IT department reviewed several products available on the market to automate and increase the productivity of its accounts receivable (AR) processes. After reviewing ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices, Sportina identified a local ABBYY partner, Konica Minolta d.o.o. in Ljubljana, Slovenia, who joined forces with Soluma d.o.o., a full service data processing and preparation provider that also provides cloud services based on ABBYY FlexiCapture.

Sportina selected ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices as the best option for optimizing its invoice processing, and the expertise from both Konica Minolta and Soluma addressed its AR needs. The implementation was swift and executed professionally within months. Additionally, Soluma implemented a document management system that served as an input for all Sportina documents.

Sportina’s new invoice processing system now includes the components necessary to improve efficiencies: a document management system (DMS) keeps all documents with metadata taken from ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices’ optical character recognition (OCR) capability; and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that contains bookkeeping functionalities for invoice processing going forward. All documents are classified within the DMS and invoices are passed through the OCR. The recognition results are then returned to the DMS where Sportina’s staff reviews and sends them through several steps of confirmation before finally sent to the ERP system.

process

Result

Sportina’s previous invoice process took 8 to 15 business days to manually confirm an invoice and enter data into its ERP system. After deploying its new system with a DMS and ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices, the apparel company is now able to classify documents without human interference and processes invoices within 5 to 7 business days. Data is extracted from documents with high efficiency and passed to the DMS automatically, thus eliminating any manual entry. Sportina was able to significantly reduce costs and redirect resources to other business critical operations.

“Working with ABBYY products and ABBYY partners has been a real joy with proper results. The entire implementation took two months where we set up the solution, trained recognition and now use it on a daily basis. The final push to a very successful project lies in the knowledge of staff of from ABBYY partners Konica Minolta d.o.o. and Soluma d.o.o. They displayed in-depth knowledge of ABBYY products and the technologies it uses. We would definitely suggest every company faced with large amounts of data entry from physical documents to consider both ABBYY and Soluma as the best solution on the market.”

Simon Jereb, Chief Logistics and IT Officer, Sportina Group

In the near future, Sportina Group plans to use ABBYY products for full text OCR to support contract maintenance processing, which would allow them to use full text search on scanned documents.