ABBYY, a provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, announced that it has helped Rhenus Assets & Services—the shared services center of the UK-based global logistics company—to automate its invoice and document processing.

Rhenus is using the ABBYY solution to process up to 1.8 million documents annually in the form of incoming invoices, delivery notes, and other paper documents. Following central processing and classification of the documents, data from incoming invoices are read according to business rules and then passed to the workflow-based approval process in SAP.

“ABBYY won us over us from the very start with an outstanding capture rate and a very good price-performance ratio,” said Thomas Schreiber, head of shared services, Corporate IT at Rhenus Assets & Services. “Just four days after installing the software, it was ready for testing and could be adapted precisely to meet the required processes, documents, and specific data items. In addition, the expert support made fast implementation possible. Overall, we are extremely satisfied.”

Rhenus uses ABBYY to centrally process a large number of time-sensitive documents such as incoming invoices, customs clearing documents, delivery notes, loading records, and order-picking notes. They perform this work for 80 locations of the Rhenus Group spread around the world.

The logistics documents are scanned at the respective locations and then transmitted to the shared services center using ABBYY FlexiCapture. Using ABBYY’s input management and invoice processing modules, all relevant data are automatically captured and verified. Integrated middleware handles archiving and sends status reports to the various logistics systems and/or partners. Incoming invoices are indexed and passed on to the respective SAP workflows for processing.

Rhenus selected ABBYY because of the high quality of data capture, its flexibility and transparency in the architecture, its scalability, and fast implementation possibilities. Established processes, including existing automation, were able to be retained in their entirety. Other business areas of the logistics provider have also now launched document-processing projects based on ABBYY software for invoices and customs documents and a further roll-out within the Rhenus Group is planned.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is an enterprise capture platform for comprehensively capturing data from a variety of document types and then passing them on to internal business processes. The solution can be customized to meet the customer’s specific needs and integrated into existing systems. Specialized modules enable automation of incoming invoices with ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices or automated processing of incoming mail with ABBYY FlexiCapture for Mailrooms.