AnyDoc INVOICE Keeps EKZ's Processes On Their Toes

EKZ, the group of electricity utility companies that cover the Zurich area in Switzerland, had an urgent need to streamline its accounts payable processes for suppliers' invoices. The company's financial accounting manager, Daniel Baumgärtner, says that there was no doubt about it. "Shorter processes times mean lower costs – it's as simple as that," he notes. Once the solution was implemented, the processing time plummeted from 10-15 days down to 2-5 days. And the cornerstone to this success was AnyDoc®INVOICE. The invoices are captured almost entirely automatically and the data reformatted and transferred into the target systems, in this case OPEN TEXT (formerly IXOS) SmartWorkflow and Livelink Archive for processing in SAP.

The EKZ companies are among the largest energy suppliers in Switzerland with a production of 5751 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the fiscal year 2004/2005. The company employs around 1100 staff and has 900,000 customers in 125 municipalities. It also has a service arm, ELTOP, which operates 36 shops selling a wide variety of power-saving electrical appliances. In addition, ELTOP constructs, extends and repairs high and low voltage installations. Finally, the subsidiary Certum Sicherheit AG is an independent company that guarantees safety and offers an advisory service on dealing with electricity as well as installation checks.

With such a range of services, there's quite a variety of invoices that arrive at the building too – for cables, plugs, vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and washing machines, but also for the purchase of electricity and paying for construction work. Every year, EKZ receives about 100,000 paper invoices – 200,000 pages in total. Roughly 65,000 of these are addressed to ELTOP. "Aside from the invoices from our biggest suppliers, no two invoices are alike," says Baumgaertner with a sigh.