Your company is growing? That’s great! An increasing number of customers is without a doubt a huge reason to be satisfied, proving the high quality of your services and products. Unfortunately, there’s also a less fun part of it. More clients mean more routine, repetitive paperwork and more employees involved the entire customer service cycle. Most of all, it takes a lot of time and effort from the sales and accounting departments. Billing at the end of the month is often one of the most dreading and busiest times for these teams. Is there a way you can make it easier?
Our team of experienced IT analysts created a new solution basing on data integration platform – FME. It’s a popular tool that allows to combine and process data from many different sources.
To test the capabilities of FME in the automation of preparing repetitive data, we took one of our teams under the loop. It currently serves over 120 clients, with an average growth of 5-7 new every month. Most of them are billed monthly, receiving service usage reports with their invoice. Each invoice may contain different administrative fees and payment terms. Some are processed in our branches in the Czech Republic and Romania.
Each month our supplier provides us with a report on total service usage. It’s a base for us to issue invoices and reports for individual clients.
Using the computing power of FME Server, we have changed the approach to invoicing our clients. At this moment the process is automated in 80%.
How did the whole process work before?
5-6 workdays
- Every sales manager responsible for particular customers had to manually generate a list of their individual service usage
- After a service usage report was generated it had to be attached to the invoice order in a division for every customer
- Invoice orders were supplemented in the Excel spreadsheet with billing and currency information and reported to the accounting department on the Microsoft Sharepoint platform
- The accounting department had to upload invoice orders together with all attachments into the SAP system to generate the final set of invoices for our customers
What did FME change?
Time reduction up to 2 workdays
- FME Server on a basis of overall consumption report automatically generates:
- Individual service consumption lists.
- A set of invoice orders for individual customers together with usage report and currency and billing information
- The whole set of documents is sent to the accounting department
- The accounting department upload files into the SAP system, which generates final sale invoices for our customers.
What else was improved?
- The sales department can focus on ongoing customer service, increasing the sales value.
- Minimized chance of errors up to 80%.
- Faster onboarding of new sales managers, fewer procedures to learn.
- Process automation does not require programming skills.
Do you want to implement a similar solution in your enterprise? Contact us – we’d be happy to advise you on how to use FME to optimize the invoicing process, automate your work and help you increase the efficiency of your team!
