Capture driven process automation solutions

Kofax Case Study Kofax Streamlines Cross Departmental Document Processing at Mercedes Benz The Challenge “For Mercedes Benz, the Speed, top performance and reliability are the key values behind Mercedes Benz’s promise to deliver world class automobiles. implementation of Kofax solution Internally, MBSA strives to provide fast and efficient service within across department yielded its individual departments. One of the challenges is the amount of documents the company processes across departments and the need immediate results. Thanks to the to log and process them as quickly as possible. ease of use of the solutions, By pinpointing their primary requirements, MBSA decided on three key employees’ trainings were kept to challenges, which affected its network of 150 dealers across South Africa, the plant in East London and head offices in Zwartkop, Gauteng. a minimum and the transition to The Mercedes-Benz dealer network of over 150 dealers, process a high the new solution was faster than number of contracts per month, including purchasing contracts and expected.” agreements for value added services such as finance, and insurance and maintenance plans. Each contract requires several supporting documents, – Mark-Anthony Nel, Manager Business such as copies of passport pages, proof of residence, bank statements, Support System, MBSA and more. These are usually sent by post to the central office where they are manually sorted, separated and filed for a minimum of seven years. A manual registry was kept, but proved to be cumbersome especially when contracts needed to be retrieved. MBSA East-London manufactures more than 50,000 vehicles each year. Many documents are created during the production process and Mercedes-Benz South Africa (MBSA) is a wholly- archived once completed and MBSA experienced challenges both with owned subsidiary of Daimler AG. The company has storage and retrieval. The time required to locate, process and store a manufacturing plant in East London which has relevant information increased the turnaround time on critical business been building vehicles in South Africa for over 60 processes. years. Headquartered in Zwartkop, Gauteng, MBSA For every vehicle produced, a job card is pre-printed for the individual manufactures Mercedes-Benz C-Class cars for the production line stations containing the Vehicle Identification Number local market as well as export to the United States of (VIN) and a body part number. The card is primarily used to register America. It also produces Mercedes-Benz commercial completion of a job at a particular workstation, but also to record vehicles and buses, Mitsubishi FUSO trucks, and any comments on the car during production. The manager at each assembles Freightliner trucks, a leading American station submits his batch of job cards daily for filing and storage. brand. MBSA`s headquarters, marketing and support Each production station works independently, so the job cards for divisions are located in Zwartkop, Gauteng, from where one specific car were often filed separately, especially as jobs could the Mercedes-Benz, smart, Freightliner, Western Star be completed on different days. With more than 500 job cards per and Mitsubishi FUSO products are marketed and day, this system of tracking and monitoring was inefficient and costly. financed. The aim of the project was to facilitate MBSA’s requirement for an application that would assist its users in digitising job cards and release the information to a back-end repository with metadata. At Zwartkop, MBSA handles all incoming accounts payable documents. These comprise of invoices, credit notes, copy tax invoices and purchase orders; approximately 6,000 documents were received monthly and had to be processed manually and track any comments made on the job and cover all aspects of entered into SAP Whenever a document had to be retrieved, it . the car production line process. was a time-consuming manual process. Accounts payable also needed an automation solution. In all of the above scenarios MBSA wanted to establish Because of the volume of documentation, it meant they a process of searching and retrieving documents quickly needed to look at a solution capable of intelligently automating and efficiently as different departments and offices, onsite the classification, sorting and separation of paper and and offsite, required quick and easy access to certify that electronic documents, then extract and validate the information information was up to date and accurate. With customers often they contain. Kofax Transformation Modules are powerful and requesting information, it was critical to make this information versatile document classification modules designed to add accessible and user-friendly. page separation, challenging data extraction and validation capabilities for unstructured documents such as invoices, credit The Solution notes, purchase orders, etc. without having to manually enter MBSA wanted to implement a system capable of capturing index fields – making it an ideal solution for efficiently capturing key information from the incoming contracts and job cards accounts payable correspondence. and make it both searchable and retrievable. In parallel, they By setting up rules for validating tax and supplier registration wanted to automate the accounts payable process. All this numbers they were able to save hours of time and increase critical information would be indexed and saved to a back-end productivity. The system is able to detect if an invoice has system. For the contracts department it was Verity/Autonomy already been processed and manage exception, thus avoiding and a custom developed solution; for the job cards it was possible duplicate payments and route such payments to an Cepra; and the accounts payable department used SAP . administrator for manual intervention. ‘’We recognized the need for change in the current system The Results architecture, said Mark-Anthony Nel, Manager Business ” ‘’For Mercedes Benz, the implementation of Kofax solution Support System “Documents contain the core information of a across department yielded immediate results. Thanks to the business, making it essential to be able to search and retrieve ease of use of the solutions, employees’ trainings were kept to the information stored within them.