Wienerberger

Wienerberger centralized its P2P and finance processes with Basware’s PDF e-Invoicing solution. The result? Truly integrated and digitized invoicing.

Wienerberger placed Basware’s market-leading e-invoicing solutions at the heart of its procure-to-pay (P2P) operations to digitize its invoice handling process and help drive greater efficiencies across its financial operations.

Wienerberger is the world’s largest bricks and clay blocks producer and the market leader for clay roof tiles. Founded in 1819 and headquartered in Vienna, the organization is represented in 30 countries and operates 197 production sites.

In 2012, Wienerberger decided to invest in new P2P technology. A new invoice platform was introduced that integrated with their SAP ERP, at the same Wienerberger onboarded Basware’s OCR solution. Then, in 2019, the company went a step further and implemented Basware PDF e-Invoice solution to eliminate paper invoices altogether.

Wienerberger’s Challenges

Wienerberger’s P2P and finance processes were originally heavily decentralized. With 51 European entities, a unified approach was required to ensure accuracy, transparency, and cost-efficiency.

In 2012, Wienerberger integrated a new invoice platform with SAP. At the same time, it implemented Basware’s OCR solution to help it digitise invoices.The ability for Basware to easily integrate with Wienerberger’s systems, responsible for the approval flow and automatic posting of invoices, was a huge driver.

AIDA is Wienerberger’s workflow for approving and digitally signing all its invoices. It’s also the legal archive for all invoices and their corresponding XMLs. The standard SAP Finance module (FI) masks are also accessed through AIDA so that the invoices can be posted. AIDA only works with XML files, and thus it can’t operate without an OCR like Basware’s.

Wienerberger introduce truly integrated and digitised invoicing with Basware

In 2019, Wienerberger decided to implement a second Basware software solution, PDF e-Invoice, with the aim of entirely eliminating the error-prone manual paper invoices. Basware’s OCR solution had already helped Wienerberger make significant progress towards increasing direct postings. Still, Vuchkov and his team knew Basware PDF e-Invoice would allow them to achieve even higher efficiency.

Invoice recognition is critically important, and with Basware PDF e-Invoice, there is the real opportunity to achieve 100% invoice recognition.” Alex Vuchkov, Finance Expert, Wienerberger.

By 2021, Wienerberger handles around 400,000 invoices in transaction volume per year, and of those, approximately 100,000 are processed through Basware’s OCR or PDF e-Invoice solutions.

For Wienerberger, processing times for a digital invoice versus manual are reduced by 50%. The net result is the processing of 100K invoices digitally, delivering a 2.5x full-time equivalent (FTE) productivity gain for the P2P team.