Heineken

Reducing complexity and committing to best practice to drive efficiencies

Industry:

Food & Beverage

Regions:

Europe

Solutions:

AP Automation, E-Invoice Receiving

By implementing Basware AP automation, Heineken achieved significant time and cost savings. Today over 90% of Heineken’s purchase invoices are matched automatically.

By consolidating their finance functions into a single shared service centre (SCC) and implementing Basware AP automation, Heineken achieved significant time and cost savings. Today over 90% of Heineken’s purchase invoices are matched automatically.

Heineken is one of the world’s leading brewers, with a wide international presence through a global network of distributors and breweries.

In 2016 Heineken Nederland took the decision to consolidate its IT, HR Facilities Management and Finance functions into a single Shared Service Center (SSC) which would service the 25 business and sales units across the country.

The goal was to reduce the time and resource dedicated to the manual processing of these invoices and to create an end-to-end automated invoice processing solution, from scanning, order matching through to archiving.

Key takeaways

93%

Automatic matching rate for e-invoices

40%

Reduction in FTEs

95%

Reduction in FTEs

Heineken's challanges

Heineken’s SSC Accounts Payable department, handled 430.000 purchases invoices every year, many of which were still paper based. Both electronic and paper invoices matching needed to dramatically increase to reduce time and resource spent on invoice approval workflow.

Another significant challenge was to find a solution which could integrate with five separate ERP instances (two SAP 4.5 systems, SAP 4.7 and 5.0 as well as an inhouse system, Proost).

Finally, Heineken has 14k+ suppliers that make up it’s supply chain adding an additional complexity and scale to the implementation project.

Control and efficiency for Heineken with Basware's AP Automation solution

Having looked at the solutions available, Heineken selected Basware AP Automation to deliver the control and efficiency the AP department required. The solution was particularly strong in two key areas for Heineken; Basware any ERP provided easy integration with Heineken’s multiple ERP systems, and the matching delivered the accuracy and speed of invoice processing to streamline the AP department workflow.

The system was successfully rolled out across the SSC in just nine months, from first proof of concept to going live with the first SAP environment.

The Basware solution has helped us achieve significant savings across the accounts payable department.”Ed Prins, Financial Services Manager at Heineken

Today, the Basware solution accesses five different ERP systems to find the relevant Purchase Orders (PO) after which it automatically matches the incoming purchase invoices with the pre-approved purchase orders. This eliminates the need for further approval workflow and generates both time and cost savings. Once the system has matched the purchase invoice to the PO, coding and audit trial on the POs is automatically copied to the invoice, which is then automatically forwarded to the ERP system for payment.

The key success factor for this project was how easily we could integrate Basware with our complex ERP environment. The Basware solution has proved incredibly flexible, providing a seamless integration with our existing systems.

Ed Prins, Financial Services Manager at Heineken

Results

The Basware solution now processes 230,000 electronic and 200,000 paper invoices. Of the 230,000 electronic invoices, 210,000 are completely automated from receipt to payment.

“The time to approve paper and electronic invoice has fallen dramatically, allowing us to devote resource to higher value core tasks,” explains Ed Prins. Baseware helped cut the approval time for order related electronic invoices by 95%, for all order related paper invoices by 60% and for non-order related invoices by 40%.

In addition, explains Prin “[Heineken] now now automatically matches over 90% of incoming e-invoices.” The accuracy of automated order matching was a key metric for the success of the project, and the Basware solution has exceeded expectations.

“Basware solution has greatly improved the accuracy and speed of our AP process. Today, we are achieving automated matching rates of up to 97% on electronic invoices,“ concludes Ed Prins. This has resulted in a significant productivity gain with Heineken able to reduce the dedicated resource to AP by 40%.