Electronic invoices were often overlooked or never made it into the approval process. Other documents were duplicated, leading to inconsistencies in posting and payment. To avoid further inconvenience to suppliers, the decision was made to implement an electronic solution. The selection process included five criteria: the internal requirements catalog, short implementation times, a high level of user-friendliness, low-cost structures, and compatibility with the SAP cloud. In total, Ahembo analyzed four different DMS solutions – DocuWare Cloud earned the highest score.

Automated document recognition despite special tax regulations

The implementation took place within a few weeks and included the heavy use of DocuWare’s Intelligent service. Due to the Canary Islands' special tax status, documents have different sales taxes. The cloud-based solution recognizes a high percentage of these documents and their index information – even though Ahembo works with more than 2,000 suppliers and a variety of tax rates. Today, the beverage specialist receives most of its invoices in electronic form. DocuWare retrieves the invoices from a dedicated e-mail box, recognizes the document type and corresponding posting information, and stores the invoices fully indexed in the digital archive. Delivery bills are scanned at the branch offices and also transferred to the DMS. The system is even able to assign delivery bills to their corresponding order and invoice. In the two-stage approval process, the responsible employees can easily access linked documents at the click of a mouse to compare prices and conditions. With the help of digital stamps, the documents are first assigned to the purchaser and then to the department management. Approved invoices appear in a task list so that accounting staff can post and pay them. In the future, the company even plans to automatically transfer the posting data read by DocuWare to the SAP cloud.

Zero tolerance strategy toward paper shows effect

"No more paper in accounting" – even Ahembo was not able to implement this demand quite so rigorously. However, the use of paper has been reduced by approximately 90 percent since the introduction of the DMS. The physical office space vacated by paper files is now available for other uses, and employees no longer waste time searching through dusty folders for important information. The automated document storage and the simple search options in the digital archive give a lot of time back to the departments – resources that the company uses profitably. Simply by enabling employees to focus on their core tasks thanks to digital document management, Ahembo has been able to significantly increase its corporate productivity.